how dare you change, how dare you stay the same?
It is autumn in New York, gold, crimson, sea breezes that blow right through my warm coat. When I go back to Raleigh for Thanksgiving, I will get my extra-warm coat, the black and white one I bought from the crazy lady on Tate Street who I understand has closed up shop since I left town.
I am keeping so many secrets from you. Here is one now: I have been hired as a columnist for the website www.nycgirl.com (insert exclamation point), not to be confused with nycgirls. com, which is porn. And not even good porn. Anyway, it's going to be great to have a weekly column gig again. Token Vagina was one of my best college experiences, and now I'll be writing about adjusting to life in New York. Another secret: I bought vinyl boots (feminist11 made me do it!). Had a great couple of days with petong, going to hip bars and buying vintage clothes. As for the columnist gig, once I have a set day of the week (probably Thursday) and a specific address, you will all know. Probably one of those mass emails. Check your spam folders.
Greensborough, as it was spelled then, was the Hartford of the South in the 1920s. It has been the next Omaha, the next Chapel Hill, the next Atlanta. Most people think that the easiest way to define a noun is to explain it in relation to other nouns: “a cross between x and y,” “a sound reminiscent of a young z.” But it is easier to define a thing by saying what it is. As a younger young woman, I located my explanations in opposites: if I was not x then I must have been y. This logarithmic life was insufficient. There is no such thing as ‘finding yourself.’ I did not go to Spain the summer after I graduated from college to find myself like you find ants swarming under a rock. What I did was enhance what was already there, let my writing go on without self-censorship. I went by myself because I could not find anyone to go with me. I was gone two months, sending postcards to friends from various pit stops: San Sebastian, Barcelona, Venice. I almost sent George a postcard to tell him I’d almost written him a letter. When I came back and changed my money, dollars were foreign currency. The Southern drawls I’d come to love, even when I caught myself in a Florentine hostel referring to myself as “ah,” were incomprehensible. Melanie says there is no such thing as a native, and I believed it then, my first language hesitant on my tongue, heavy with unfamiliar syllables. Though I’d had to read Italian phonetically out of a book, it was the language of train stations and kiosks selling maps. Trying to navigate my first (or was it second? Could I sign before I could speak?) language, I stumbled over idioms.
Coming home is a long process. You can only return because you’ve survived. Eight weeks of inadequate sandals on cobblestone had left me with blisters and callouses. And I was not coming home, not going to Magnolia Street to unpack my things but to Raleigh to repack them and be on my way again. My green suitcase was now the constant in my life, the new point around which everything narrowed. The JPF, as the locals call it, is how to break Greensboro. From its perch, it determines directions: the bigger it gets, the closer you are to downtown. On the corner of Market, which splits downtown streets into north-south, and Elm, which splits them into east-west, it is the only compass I ever needed. When Allen realized the flaws of his never-leave-Elm-Street project, he amended it to never going anywhere outside of JPF viewing range. His strangest exercise in self-imposed limits was when he wouldn’t leave his room in Elsewhere for twenty-four hours, even managing to build a contraption that would lift his delivered pizza up to the second floor and send his money down in return. Because he could not or would not leave Greensboro, he amused himself by splitting it into as many fractions as he could, whether it was a room, a street, or a girl. A release from one of his invented claustrophobias would make the city new again, delaying the realization that it was the same place where he had always been.