The Usual Pathways of a Brand-New Brain: Independence, Change, and Leaving Yourself Behindg
*Article from Lexington Line Autumn/Winter 2024 Issue, pages 84-86
Check out the full issue here
New York was finally growing into me.
I no longer assumed I’d be charged a reasonable price for a street hot dog, nor did I recoil at the sight of a license-plate-sized rat. I’d roll my eyes at the pedicab assault of Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” its passengers millennials sporting gaudy Canal Street Gucci bags, or middle-American tourists, pink from exhaustion, or even tweens-at-large, split from the group on a class trip, layered shopping bags, slung on wrists, hot pink T-shirts shouting “Franklin Middle School” sporting bold black print.
My first time in New York City was the day I moved here, and I remember telling myself that even if the city treated me as badly as I heard it would, nothing could be worse than being stuck as myself in the place that I came from. That may have been a naïve thought, because I was in for the thing most unfathomably foreign to a pre-18-year-old mind: independence in full throttle.
Surviving a walk against the grain of Fifth Avenue’s consumer stampede at noon on a Sunday was my version of some state school’s Greek Life hazing, only this was Manhattan. I held my head in line with the horizon; to ogle the city's skyscrapers—the crystallized growths that may as well have sprouted from the concrete—was to reveal myself as a transplant, and I remember that’s the last thing I was told I wanted to be perceived as (even though that's what New York is all about).
In two years, I went from waking up to the basement bedroom view of a concrete window-well in my parents’ house to the significantly more pleasant sight of an office building across 51st, and then to my first apartment, where I settled for an Eastern-facing bedroom view positioned parallel to an elderly neighbor’s bathroom window. This is all to say that I willingly flung myself into the machine of utter change, hoping to be distilled down to the kind of person who can do it all on her own, and even find it thrilling.
Instead, I dug down so far from where I started that I hit struggle, and also banality, which was the thing I hated most. The way I see it now, I’m up to the ceiling with checked-off milestones of growing from child to adult: I had my 18th birthday, chose a college across the country, and got my own apartment; now I grocery shop on Mondays at 2 p.m. unless I’m scheduled for work that day.
I can single handedly build an IKEA Expedit and caulk the walls in my bathroom, and it's harrowing to know that “it’s my responsibility.” I think back to the period on the precipice of real life; it was two weeks before my high school friends and I were set to leave for college. We were all to disperse from the core in two weeks, and that reality was present in the sick that lined our stomachs.
It was the last sip of summer. We were headed east. Sean and I figured we should each drive a car over to the campsite.
We were the only ones that had it in them to endure three-odd hours behind the wheel that morning. Waking up before the birds for this venture hit us like a train; it flattened the highs of a spodie-drunk summer, where we were all 18 and, for the last time in our lives, exempt from the cortisol spikes induced by alarm clocks and W2s and knowing what day of the week it was.
So we left the Emerald City, for the last time as kids going back home to their parents, for a few days in the dust and all-American charm of Washington’s East. In the car, we talked over the twang of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan about who we wanted to be and all that we hoped to leave behind.
“I wondered if the city had ever heard quiet like this, and if I’d crave it once I was there”
The part of eastern Washington that borders the Columbia River is a spread of land that resembled burnt-sienna oil pastel, barren if you discounted its stout plateaus and tufts of lichen-green emaciated brush and shadowless, towering windmills trailing a monotone gray highway.
I wondered if The City had ever heard quite like this, and if I’d crave it once I was there.
Here, the sun had the bandwidth to blanket the land with heat haze so strong it was malleable. My breaths slipped down my throat and plumed on the way out. The atmosphere had this almost rippling quality, like the greasy mirage propane causes when you’re cooking on a barbecue, or when you take your mascara off with coconut oil.
The same distortion drew my gaze weeks later through the backseat window of my very first New York yellow cab. It was a Turkish bath outside, and my mother, who had already done the Manhattan thing a number of times, was sitting to the left of me and pointing out things like The Vessel and Little Island, 99-cent pizza joints and guys selling counterfeit designer bags on crowded avenues. It was like I was seeing the film set of my mother’s stories.
“One time my taxi pulled up to that light right there.” She pointed over me and out the right-side window. “Jim Carrey was in the car next to us!”
She had a flight out the next day, though it already felt like we had said our proper goodbyes.
The night I got back from camping, we sat in the backyard of the house where I'd spent my Terrible Teens. I pulled out one of the American Spirits I had left over from camping, just to see what she would do, and she asked if she could steal a drag or two. In that moment, I realized my mother had already accepted my new stage of life and grieved—or relieved herself of—the old one. Maybe I already had, too, when my friends and I took our one last temporary trip away from home.
The lake at Potholes is not a lake; it is a topographical depression filled with runoff from the Columbia Basin that may or may not give you an algae rash if you dare wade its waters. But it was 95 degrees outside, and we all brought clothes we didn’t care about, so we were going to get in the water—hives or not.
The sun was telling us it would set soon. It cast beacons of molten gold over the reservoir’s polite ripples and onto our faces. We hadn’t thought to apply sunblock. The sky’s complexion was clear and peachy and free from clouds of worry.
We were 18 and naïve to the fact that our friendships or our memories or the skin around our eyes would pucker with time, that student loans and grocery shopping and Con Edison would rule our finances, that as we got older, our parents would too.
Over the course of our three-night stay in the campsite we had poured Budweisers down the sinkhole of impending doom we were avoiding and reiterated over and over how glad we were that high school was finally over, and college was starting—how we’d miss this gray area. We bathed in the water, and cattails stood as pillars on the crumbling shoreline: Corinthian columns standing ground as we baptized one another into adulthood.