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I’ve been missing New York City a lot lately. Yesterday I started looking at pictures from my move back to Missouri, and when I did, I realized there were things I had intended to blog (about my move) that I wasn’t able to at the time for logistical reasons.
Case in point: My last trip to Dunkin’ Donuts…
One of the first stops my dad and I made for gas once we’d exited New York City was a gas station with a Dunkin’ Donuts inside. I ordered my last New York-style Dunkin’ Donuts bagel with a cup of Yogi Tea, instead of my usual coffee, since it was late at night. Yogi Tea always has a quote or insightful message on the paper tab that hangs out of the cup, and that night, my Yogi tea sent an eerily relevant message.
All of my belongings were packed into a single van (not a truck…a van), we were headed 1031 miles away for me to begin my new life in my hometown, and this is what my Yogi Tea had to say…
Travel Light, photo by smalltowngirl
“Travel Light, live light, spread the light, be the light”
***
The contents of my New York City apartment, in a van:
Traveling Light, photo by smalltowngirl
I used to listen to The Eagles often.
The lyrics of the last stanza of the song, “New York Minute” say,
What the head makes cloudy
The heart makes very clear
The days were so much brighter
In the time when she was here
But I know there’s somebody somewhere
Make these dark clouds disappear
Until that day, I have to believe
I believe, I believe
In a New York Minute
Everything can change
Forward. photo of smalltowngirl
I moved away from New York City four months ago, and I’m just beginning to comprehend the meaning of the New York Minute.
Don’t get me wrong – I thought that I understood it before. It’s only now that I’m outside of New York, though, that I really get it.
In the last four months, the whole of my life has changed like a whirlwind.
Today, a yellow envelope arrived in the mail from the guy my world revolved around for almost half of my time in New York.
His return address has changed, and in the envelope was no note. There was nothing personal inside the envelope at all, actually. Inside the envelope was a t-shirt he’d found of mine, and a CD with “pictures of you” scrawled across it in red marker.”
My memories of New York are so real. So alive. So huge.
And yet, this little piece of plastic seems to represent how tiny those memories really are in the grand scheme of my life. Should I feel cheated that my memories are so easily captured and contained? Maybe. But I have to believe that if those two amazing years in New York City seem so tiny now, it bodes well for how big and extraordinary my future must be.
Sitting at Foundation Grounds in Maplewood, intending to work remotely after a morning meeting at Westport, my work servers have crashed, and I’m unable to access emails or files for work.
The coffee shop is lovely, with refreshingly happy and down to earth staff (no snobbish yuppy baristas here). There is a quirky turquoise mural of a tree with white flowers blossoming on the wall, and mismatched (but coordinated) upholstery covers high-backed chairs.
The pear and brie sandwich I had for lunch was lovely (fair warning though – it was onion heavy, though the onions were raw and easily removable). The iced mocha wasn’t bad either. Foundation Grounds gets brownie points for using biodegradable plastic cups, made from corn.
In the cold case, I found Kambucha, organic juices, Honest Tea, and Stonyfield Farm yogurt – a fairly forward-thinking collection of foods and drinks for this part of the country.
To top off my visit to Foundation Grounds, I overheard someone speaking Mandarin Chinese, and turned to find a husband and wife speaking Chinese to one another. The husband, a St. Louis-born acupuncturist and his wife had just moved back to St. Louis three days ago from years in Seattle and Asia.
His Chinese was far more fluent than my own (embarrassingly rusty) Chinese is, but it was so uplifting to meet another person who has moved back “home” to this part of the country after seeing the world in hopes of contributing something to the communities we grew up in.
Today’s coffee shop encounter is a reminder that when things happen (like servers crashing), there’s often something better in store. It’s been a rough last week for me, but with my hope and optimism restored, I’m looking forward to what the rest of this week holds.
It’s 9:49 p.m., and I’m sitting in my office in Potosi, Missouri after a full day of work, including eight hours in the office and several more with our board of directors. If ever before this year I had been told I would work in Potosi, Missouri, I would have bet everything I owned that you were lying. (And I’m not a better).
If you had told me I’d love my new position working in Potosi, Missouri, I would probably have laughed in your face. (And I’m generally very polite).
Yet here I am, tired after my first week of work here, but tired in the “sugarplums dancing in their heads” kind of way, where I feel an excitement about what’s to come and such a deep peace about where I am in this moment that rest will come easily when I finish this post and crawl into my bed.
This week I have been woken up by the family dog, I’ve had coffee at the kitchen table with my dad before work, and I’ve watched my mom get so creative and excited about cooking really great, healthy meals for us.
Wednesday on my way home from work, I saw a deer cross the road in front of me and run down a hill and into a field. The weather has warmed up here, so I’ve continued to test out my new trail running shoes on jogs in the woods behind the office. Tonight, I held a chincilla in my hands (his little nose was adorable, and his “pricklies” were softer than they looked!).
My coworkers are gracious, thoughtful, and incredibly welcoming. Do not misunderstand me here, they are also hard-working, experienced, many of them very well-traveled professionals. They have brought me into my first week here at the Y with nothing but compassion and kindness, which heals my soul in ways that I didn’t know it was even aching.
Do I miss New York City? Of course I do, in little ways, and sporatically. Do I love where I am though, professionally and personally; mentally, spiritually, and physically? Yes, wholly.
All things happen for a reason, and I believe that my new job and new home are no exceptions.
Dad pulled in to Brooklyn just before 2 p.m., and after finding a parking space and exchanging a bear hug, we headed to La Bagel Delight for a sandwich.
Bellies full, and drizzly rainy grossness falling from the sky, we opted out of staying the night in New York, and opted in to packing the van to get the hell out of dodge.
Photo by smalltowngirl
Several trips down my four flights of stairs later, my room stood empty, the moving van sat full, and Dad and I prepared to sit in traffic on our way out of the city.
Two of my roommates, Bill and Suzanne, got home just before Dad and I were leaving. We spent a few minutes saying our “goodbye for now”s, we gave each other hugs, and they stood on the stoop to watch as Dad and I drove away.
South Oxford Street Gang
Photo by PapaG
As we made our way uptown toward the Lincoln Tunnel, Dad got a quick peek at Macy’s, and I convinced him to make a minor detour so that he could say he’d seen Times Square.
At about the same time this afternoon, my mom looked out the window to see eleven deer in the backyard. She snapped several pictures, and blogged about it, saying “NY = 0; MO = 1″.
Wrapping our way back down 9th Avenue and over on 39th street, we entered the Lincoln Tunnel.
When we exited the tunnel, New York City was behind us, and once it was, I didn’t look back.
I sat with Jeff on a park bench in Chinatown watching teenagers in t-shirts toss a football to one another. It was nearly fifty degrees today after weeks of temperatures that hovered around zero, so warm sunshine and the lunar new year brought a sense of lightness to the park around us.
My hope when he invited me to come with him to Chinatown today was that we’d find our shared space again – the space where “he” and “I” are “us”.
We talked quietly about what lead us to break up; how I wouldn’t have applied for a job out of state if I’d known he saw a
future with me, and how me applying for a job out of state was the beginning of him falling out of love with me.
In seven months, he’d never spoken the words, “I love you” to me. Today he spoke them twice, and while it was good to hear him verbalize his feelings for me, it wasn’t romantic or special the way it should be when those words are spoken to someone for the first time.
I watched a lanky Asian boy gracefully catch the football his friend threw.
Instead of sharing the words, “I love you” with a sense of excitement or aniticpation, I heard them from Jeff for the first time with a football landing in a teenager’s hands, and a vacuum-like sense of emptiness in the pit of my stomach.
The words, “I love you” weren’t followed by a kiss or a hug. They were followed with a request that we be “friends.”
“I don’t want you to be my ex-anything,” he said to me. “I don’t think of you as my ex-girlfriend. I think of you as my friend.”
Kids laughed and an old man shuffled by in clunky black tennis shoes.
A hawk flew down from the sky and clutched a mouse from the sidewalk between its talons. As quickly as it landed, it flew away again. I’d never seen anything quite like that – such a breathtakingly graceful gesture, but one that ended in the death of a living thing.
I’d never felt anything quite like what I was feeling then, in the park, when Jeff finally admitted that he loved me, but followed it with a request that we be friends, either.
Some things just aren’t built into our natural, biological, or intuitive sense of understanding. Hearing “I love you” followed by “I want to be friends” is one of them.
“I want to be your friend, but I’m not even sure how to do that,” I told him.
I’d have my opportunity to learn how to do that a short time later as we entered a party thrown by his coworker, Ed, who promply introduced me to someone else as Jeff’s girlfriend.
I was proud of myself for smiling, not crying, and making small talk with the people there. I was proud of myself for doing everything in my power to be Jeff’s “friend” when so deep inside my heart, I feel pulled to be the girl he loves and holds and takes care of - not the girl he’s friends with.
“This is my friend, Melissa,” he would say to people as he introduced me.
I am his friend, Melissa. I would think to myself, rehearsing this new role that I’ve been forced into.
We went to the roof of the building, and I looked out onto the streets of Chinatown. Colorful scraps of paper littered the streets from the parade earlier in the day.
Nearly two weeks after accepting my new job in Missouri, a sense of the scale of that decision hit me firmly in the chest as I stood looking out on Chinatown from that rooftop.
I’m leaving New York, and in deciding to leave, I’m also turning my back on one of the best things that’s happened to me in a very long time; my relationship with Jeff.
The tears started then, as this sense of perspective hit me, and Jeff and I said a quick goodbye. He squeezed me in his arms, but it wasn’t the same as it used to be.
I wiped away a few tears there on the roof, but tried to hold my composure until I reached the street outside of Ed’s building, at which point tender sobs grew out of my hurt.
I walked crying through Chinatown, to the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, and I cried as I walked across it into downtown Brooklyn.
Through Brooklyn Heights and into Fort Greene I cried.
I cried as I walked through Fort Greene Park, down Dekalb Avenue, and onto South Oxford Street, where I sat for a few minutes on the stoop of our brownstone, taking it all in, and letting a few more tears stream down.
That was hours ago, but tears are sliding down my cheeks again now as I write this, in my pajamas, in my little bedroom in my shared apartment in Brooklyn – a place I can’t call home much longer.
I’m not his girlfriend anymore, and soon I won’t be a New Yorker anymore either. I pray that this decision I’ve made is the right one.
I still have just over a month before I start my new job in Missouri, and already I’m fighting the urge to fill every anticipated free moment with an activity of one kind or another after I’ve arrived.
I’ve researched intramural sports teams (dodgeball, whiffleball, kickball) in St. Louis. I’ve started thinking about who I’ll go to for haircuts. About where I’ll go to church, and about who might be enjoy going to museums with me.
I’ve started daydreaming about my dad and I fixing up the little house he bought, intending to resell later as part of his retirement.
I’ve laid out budgets and basic financial goals for the next six months, next three years, and longer. I’ve tried to imagine how I’ll arrange my furniture and what pictures I’ll hang on the walls.
I’ve started laying plans for warmer weather; what vegetables my mom and I will grow in our garden, and how we’ll go for evening walks in Engler Park.
I’ve even started buildling a mental list of what movies I should rent on Netflix, so that I don’t become disconnected from the independent film world that I’ve just started to develop a little understanding about.
I’ve wondered what music I’ll play on the piano at night. Whether the public library will have the books I want to read, and whether I’ll find myself relishing in lazy Saturday mornings at home, or if I’ll be in the car headed to yoga and farmer’s markets in St. Louis every weekend.
For as hard as the decision to leave New York was to make, I certainly appear to myself to be excited about this change. Coworkers comment that my face lights up, or that I sound “whole” when I talk about this new stage in my life.
So here’s to new beginnings in Missouri. Beginnings which will probably quickly move from being quiet and peaceful to being my typical-Melissa whirlwind of activity.
And here’s to my last month in New York City, a city in which I’ve learned that I can love and be loved after a bad attempt at marriage. A city that’s taught me a lot about what it means to be successful, motivated, competitive, and creative. And a city that’s taught me a little bit more about what I do and don’t want to be part of my life, professionally and personally.
