The Contact Zone

…quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. — Joan Didion

In the cab, my mother and aunt talked nervously.  Actually we were in a taxi.  My great-grandfather was a cabbie in D.C. for decades.  But we were no longer in D.C.  Here, these were taxis.  They were yellow and checkered, like in the movies.  We hailed it coming out of LaGuardia, and my mother and aunt were to help me move into my summer home in NYU dorms.  University Hall and three unknown interns were to be my new home.  My mother and my aunt would not shut up.  This was more for them than it was for me, it seemed.  I would have gone by myself if I could, but that was not going to happen.  We rushed out of the tunnel, into the barely-there light streaming through the tall buildings.  I craned my neck to look up and I saw a small patch of blue in between the skyscrapers.  I didn’t feel confined; I felt free.

My previous experiences with D.C.—the city itself, not the region—were my grandmother’s stories of growing up in Northeast D.C. and my handful of trips to museums on fieldtrips or with my father.  My one time into the city was when I was 18; my then-boyfriend and I went to some museums, watched the news crews surround the federal courts hoping to find Monica Lewinsky on her way out, then wandered through Georgetown in the late afternoon.  There was a bomb threat somewhere that day and I came home late to a mother who was worried and furious, but that was nothing new.

But in New York, I would walk from Union Square to Times Square every day.  Meandering through the green market, I saw vegetables I had never seen before.  It took a trip into the archetype of urban life for me to see kale, resplendent and standing at full attention.  Brussels sprouts like large, pale green marbles.  I loved navigating the filthy streets, watching shop owners pull up the gates.  One day I bought small, sweet strawberries and a bottle of balsamic vinegar.  I ate the entire pint, doused in the tart syrup, feeling decadent and rebellious.  My mother and grandmother would never do such a thing.

I loved the long sweaty walk to work, the soundtracks to my life blaring in headphones: Surfer Rosa, The Moon and Antarctica, a mixed tape I made that represented everything I loved and hated all at once, T’s greatest mixtape ever of ska on side A and funk on side B, a nod to a particularly schizophrenic night the previous spring.  One weekend, T came down from outside the city, and we wandered through the East Village, eating pizza, sitting in Tompkins Square Park with the junkies, the combination of piss and flowers and car fumes all mixing around us.  We talked about how one day we would figure our shit out, how happiness did really exist somewhere out of our reach, how one day we would get past all of this, how one day we might learn how to sleep.

I don’t know if we’ve answered those questions, ten years later.  I tell myself I’ve made peace with those questions, and not knowing.

I was simultaneously a 60-year-old woman and 14-years-old all at once, and this is the only way I can resolve the manic love and lust I have for that entire summer, even though that was the summer I shattered like Humpty Dumpty.  That summer was beautiful and shiny and sharp.  I learned what it meant to grow up for every phone call promised bad news, and I learned what it meant to refuse to cope.  I learned what it meant to lose a part of yourself and never get it back.  I learned how to con, to use anyone and anything in order to convince myself that I was okay.

By the end of the summer, I no longer recognized myself in the mirror.  Leaving the dorm by myself, I passed by my reflection and wondered why I had dark circles under my eyes, why I was so pale, why my eyes seemed unresponsive, as if I were someone else.  I hailed a taxi and headed back to LaGuardia.  The plane was delayed, and waiting in the airport, under fluorescent glare, I felt the earth falling away from me long before my plane took off.

Joining Everything in Between, Charlotte’s Web, Jade Park and Fog City Writer working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. It’s called Alphabet: A History.

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Previous letters:

B is for Billboard

A is for Annandale