Saudade

A year and two days ago, I left Ely in eastern central Nevada and drove through the desert until the isolated highways were swallowed into interstates and I found myself back in California, at the end of a trip that ostensibly started two weeks prior when I packed up a minivan’s worth of possessions that whimsy had decided were worth keeping and headed west out of New York. There is another version of the tale where the trip actually started three years earlier when I first left Southern California for the uncertainty of a new life in the city (for is there not only one City, for any that have lived there and many who have not?), but this isn’t that version. I still may figure out how to tell that story someday, but today I want to talk about the act of leaving.

Choosing to leave New York wasn’t necessarily a difficult decision to reach – there were practical reasons, as well as promises I had made, that had long since removed any sense of personal agency in the action. That doesn’t mean that leaving wasn’t one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. In fact, it was only by buying into the illusion that I had little choice in the matter that the transition was possible at all. I don’t mean to mislead you into thinking that I was not, at least in part, looking forward to moving back to Los Angeles; in many ways, I was anxious to try for a life in California that had commanded a large share of my younger aspirations. What I only mean to say is that no part of me wanted anything to do with committing that greatest of transgressions, the sin of leaving New York.

There have been many who have said that staying too long in New York is a risk run by everyone who chooses to live there. Despite only being one of those anecdotal bits of wisdom, it's something you accept as an unalienable fact when you first decide to make a go of it in the city. I remember thinking during my first days there, “Two years. I can do two years here, and then it’ll probably be time to go home.” I did not anticipate that long before those two years were up, my conception of “home” would change, and that arbitrary prognostication of when I would be ready to leave would stretch far beyond any horizon I could see. In the end, I left when the enchantment was still in my eyes, with great hope but little real chance of ever returning to call it home again.

It has been a year and two days since I was last in New York. Since then, I have made a new home in Los Angeles, largely by virtue of putting down roots because it was easier to have them than to not. I have not stayed this long in one place in a long time, and the steadiness of the days is not something I am used to just yet. My time in New York was adorned with a desultory mode of being. Every few months, there was either a trip back to California or to somewhere new, the Ann Arbors and Austins I found a sudden interest in seeing. Other countries seemed closer than before, even when they were not, and anyway it was a simple matter to go find out just how close they really were if the fancy struck. Moving to a new place shook me out of my tendency toward a sedentary default, and changed the rules for what boundaries my life had to fit in. Even when I stayed local, work constantly took me to Long Island and New Jersey, those bastions of the butt end of jokes people who lived in New York told each other, yet oddly exotic to me. I knew the jokes, but did not know firsthand why the punch lines were funny, not until I went myself. And the city itself had an endless number of corners and crevices, ready for me to reach toward, waiting for me to find. What I am saying is that when I found myself living in a place where how I fit into it was not already assumed, where the history was not already congealed into something tactile in my subconscious, even the mundane could skew magnificent, and it is that easy wonderment and the appetite it awakened that I have missed since steadiness first cast the pace of my days into an even canter.

I have enough of a pragmatist streak in me to know that the change was inevitable. That having a savings account and a healthy diet would have to, at some point, trump a second floor walk-up with great natural light and getting hammered at Whiskey Ward on wayward weeknights. Leaving, in that regard, was the sensible thing to do, and I am realizing now that I do not regret it, not really. What I do regret is being unable, maybe even unwilling, to find a way to feel how I felt when New York was home. But when I start to think that, another notion creeps in, telling me that perhaps I am looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. That perhaps the point is to find a new way toward wonderment, a new way to feel now that New York is not home.

It is a convincing theory, and a comforting one, but ultimately one for tomorrow, or the day after. Right now I am not looking to be convinced or comforted; I am looking to miss something that is not mine anymore, knowing full well that the fair (to spin one of Joan Didion's characterizations) looks rosiest after it has ended. But that does not change the fact that once the fair has ended, nothing feels like it will ever be the same again.