it also surprised me how quickly i got in and out of the post office, mailing superfluous clothing back to cali at the last minute. it surprised me how smoothly i’m running today.

yet another surprising yes is that towing my suitcase from prospect park to canal street was hassle-free. i rode the Q train, happily uncrowded at this time of day. it suddenly occurred to me to reflect, this is my last ride on this damn train. i am leaving new york and i won’t be riding subways anymore. i was surprised that i didn’t feel anything. i pushed at the walls of this thought, and they proved quite elastic. so i decided to be okay with—at peace.

i looked out the cloudy windows at each stop on the way—7th avenue, atlantic avenue-pacific street, dekalb avenue—and wondered if the people there are ever bothered much by living their lives in a file, a lineup, underground and on the side. it bothered me to be so orderly. i thought about the prospect of wide streets, even freeways, with cars shooting by; i thought about looking up and seeing sky in equal square footage with concrete and steel. i thought about bends in the road, curves of chaparral foothills, tunnels of tidewater.

yee haw, i thought.

i’ll miss the freaks that are so thickly sown here. i’ll miss the roadside stands with cashmere scarves for five dollars, an amount that can’t buy you a meal on the same street. i’ll miss the trees that turn the air and the ground the color of ripe apples with their leaves in the fall. i’ll miss the bridges.

but when i say that i’ll miss these things, i don’t imagine i will pine for them. they’ve hung on my refrigerator and walls, but they haven’t kept me warm.

everyone moves so quickly past the window in front of me. it’s warm outside—some of them wear only t-shirts, but others wear overcoats in deference to the autumn. one girl walked by wearing purple metallic curls in her hair, and another was wearing insect antennae. it’s october 31st. they are all so different. how do i know where i am, except for the architecture? i haven’t lived here long enough to feel that punch in the stomach familiarity. but again, why force it? for me, real emotion, like real friends, comes at once and without any doubt as to its identity. looking at that sentence, i affirm that it’s true, and i am confident that i’ll find that place, just as i’ve found friends—suddenly, undeniably, comfortably, ambitiously. a place i can go forward with.

i saw two young people on the Q train, reading the onion together and kissing. i’m confident that that will come, too, and in the same way.

isn’t it funny i should feel no regret right now? i’m leaving new york city. i’m going back to my home country, land of valley girls and ubiquitous highlights, of giant corporate commercial operations, of soulless suburbs and faceless business districts. it’s familiar, and not only because my family is there. something about the place where i’m from—i want to know a little more about it. my experience of it now must, of necessity, be so different now that i’m letting it be itself, and trying my best to be myself. how shall we coexist? what shall we tell each other?

oh, sunlight! oh, ocean! open spaces, warm breezes, fog in the morning and the night, foothills covered in chaparral, coyotes still howling at night somewhere behind our house, wide sidewalks where you dodge the skaters, faded t-shirts and worn-out flip-flops, wide six-lane freeways where you can see everything you’re passing, and looking ahead to the edge of the world, and crying seagulls.

and if it’s not any of that? i’m at peace with that, too, for the moment anyway. all of that?—it’s inside me, it’s what i brought away from california; maybe i didn’t even know it was in my baggage. but i’m bringing it back with me.

i wonder what i’m bringing away from new york city? a little hardness, boldness and aggression, a certain quantity of cynical laissez-faire, confidence that shit works out—it’s not always good but it’s a lot longer and slower way down to absolute zero than i ever thought. the reaffirmation that selling yourself is not really a good idea, at least not for me. the work speaks for itself, and your own prosperity needs not to be touted. also, haircuts are essential. also, originality is everything, so it’s better to be a freak than a clone. also, it is better to be thought rude than to be a tool; regret and self-loathing is the result of constant use.

my bus just hit the mainland. gas stations, corporate outlets, derelict old buildings, offensive new buildings. already the sky is clearer. it’s like, “hey, here i am!” so much road lies ahead. and indeed, there will be time. i love that thought — i spent nearly a year in new york and i’m only twenty-six. i’ve been all over the world, i am so much smarter and braver than i used to be, and there is more time ahead of me that i have no idea what i’ll do with. i realize now that, as a kid, i seldom thought beyond college. maybe that’s why senior year was my peak. but it’s only a quarter of the life span i mean to have. so much time remains to go more places, to become smarter and braver through new lessons and new fears.

i thought no farther than college because i always thought that was when everything was set in place and the rest was a sort of timeless, peaceful elysium of keeping house. i was depressed for a while that i wasn’t married right out of school, but now—now! i am more than okay with being single, even alone. i can go about at will. one day, if i stay, it will be at will, not because it is time.

i don’t know what to expect after this; as a result, time and the road open up like Cinemascope.

there will doubtless be images, static and motive, that inspire me to come back. this isn’t the same as missing. it is the result, the payoff, the mystery plant that will emerge in time from the seeds strewn in my heart and psyche during the last year. it is knowledge i don’t know i have yet. it is a notch on my belt that i won’t see until someone points it out to me. it is the tool that i won’t know is in my box, until suddenly i need it and there it will be, waiting.

it seems to me at the moment that you can’t lose, if you decide not to.

watching scary movies, the girls shrilled and the guys cracked wise; everyone drank white russians and microbrews. one girl asked for a martini, in a coy whisper — she got it, courtesy of the host’s chivalry. the puppy gnawed on people’s fingers; it also ate the back of one girl’s earring — the same girl who needed a martini in a kitchen stocked with kahlua and leffe.

it is so warm in here. i want to live here, where it is warm, busy and friendly, and even annoying people are welcome because we just take them easy.

L looks like a tree in the desert, lean and strong and unadorned. her smile is bright and she seems positive. her room is still a gypsy whirl, like it was the last two years. oh, those last two years! the cold days, the rain and frozen sidewalks, the shuddering shuffle from my dormitory to her brightly-painted house, seem like a distant dream. the tiny town wears its auburn and blue right now, but being at L’s house makes me remember what i tried sometimes to escape by fleeing the campus to her sanctuary. it was the bedraggled aspect the trees will wear in dreary november and february, when there is nothing going on, no money to be made, and loneliness breathing frostily against the windows of my narrow room.

what would it be like to live it again this year, to try to make the town’s acquaintance from where i now stand?

listening to her talk about professors and class discussions doesn’t make me feel old, as i might have expected. instead, i feel like i’m no age — i feel feeble and green — i just want a new thing. i see that maybe she’s running the same path as i did, and she fears falling into a rut after graduation, and maybe that fear will provoke her to commit to something she doesn’t want or need. but i don’t feel like i’m looking down from the upper floors; i’m listening to her with the hope that she will puzzle out an answer for both of us.

and what would our friendship be like if i were only meeting her just now?

undergraduate life is like a solar eclipse. we could be long-term students, but these strange four years where expectation lifts its hands off us, and our potential is intently regarded, are unlikely to grace us again. this kind of time will never be ours again unless we fight for it. (of course, we could argue that the amount of money we paid for this time makes a fight unnecessary. this time is not purely a gift.)

what is a gift is these years’ full occupation of us, if we give ourselves to them. i see it in L, and i wish on the harvest moon to have it again. the greatest life is when what they called suspended reality is your reality, when something we do proves so startlingly original that expectations fall back in disconcerted amazement, making them always afterward think twice before they try to impress us into their service again.

we have the work ethic. i hope we are so lucky as to use it, L. we deserve it, because we are responsible folks.

(october 31, 2008)