Space between

places

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I meet someone at a party who is from Santa Fe. We talk about the problem of space. There’s a fear of being seen, that’s why we’re inside, he says. All cramped together in someone’s bedroom whose name we don’t know. Elsewhere, you’d be outside. At this apartment, the only outdoor space is a small patch of roof. There’s a hole outside of the exit door that has become a hot topic of conversation. Someone will fall through. Back home, we’d be sitting on porches that were falling in on themselves. In New Mexico, the spacious corridors of a home anyone in the room could comfortably afford to rent. Why we choose to live here, cramped together and sweating, seems absurd when we talk about the desert’s openness. You’d have somewhere to breathe. We’re in the only room with AC. Typically, this would be the room where people would come to do drugs. But everyone in here is quietly talking to each other. Drinking water and introducing themselves. 

We talk about living in New Mexico. I did for a summer when I was a teaching assistant at a camp for gifted children. I explain this. I didn’t truly get to explore. I was confined to the retreat center where the camp was held. Our hikes were beautiful but supervised and conservative. His friend says I saw ninety percent of what there was to see. That is, other than the stretch of land where people go to execute their dogs. Everywhere, she says, there are dead dogs everywhere. I remember the skinny dogs in Taos Pueblo. That day we visited, I cried for no real reason beyond feeling that I was wasting something. Recently graduated and jobless after the camp’s end, there was no direction towards which to fling myself. As I sat outside the mission church, I remembered the James Wright poem that ends I have wasted my life. 

The humidity returns me to the room. The desert’s dry air disappears as quickly as I conjured it in my imagination. Back here in Brooklyn, the stranger says something so poetic that I spend a minute or two repeating it so I don’t forget and can write about it later. The air is damp and filled with other people’s breath. I’m sitting on the floor by the feet of the person I’ve been talking to since I came into the room. He’s kept his shoes on despite the pile outside the front door that indicated the host’s preferences. You don’t have to be like everyone else, he says. It’s sometimes as simple as that. 

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Sometimes it feels like the only thing I do is move. I use my step counter to measure the success of a day. The further I go, the more I know I’ve made use of the city that I’ve been given. I walk more in New York than any of the seven other places I’ve ever lived. At times, I feel like a fish in an aquarium. I have direction even when it’s simply based on instinct. It’s odd when someone asks me if I like living in New York. Like anything, I’m rarely consciously considering whether I like something or not until it’s long over. Recently, I wrote that I’m no longer waiting for the next thing to happen. Not the next job, the next relationship, the next city. My life is here, now, and everything I wait for now are routine holding periods. It’s difficult to call this contentment because it assigns a passive quality to life that I don’t believe is possible, but it’s something like this. I’m still impatient, but the impatience has changed. I want continuity rather than change. I hope there isn’t a time I have to decide whether I like living here or not. Because that would mean I was long gone. 

It’s been five years since I graduated college. I’ve lived in so many places in those five years. Five years since that summer in New Mexico, the first place I lived other than North Carolina, even if it was briefly. I find myself, when talking to the stranger, unable to explain what it made me feel like to live so briefly in a place that now lives so expansively in my imagination as one of the best summers of my life. That I’ve always found goodness, that I’ve always lived richly seems more of an accident than anything. My therapist says I’m good at the reflection piece, but less so at recognition. When something good is happening, it tends to feel like an accident. 

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Those mornings I woke early. I walked across the grassy patch to the single kitchen onsite to sterilize my airway clearance equipment. I’d go on runs as the light stretched over the red sand. The mornings were not yet hot. I couldn’t believe how quiet it was. Couldn’t fathom how the moon could look that way in the sky. A hangnail before being torn away into white-hot day. The cell service was spotty. I couldn’t call home, couldn’t send a picture without the message failing. In the spartan kitchen, I sat on the counter with dirty feet and waited for the water to boil. I became anonymous in my solitude, even if I was responsible for ten campers and had four colleagues who had not yet woken up. I forgot the facts of myself. I don’t know if that had happened before or if it will ever again.

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Different places I’ve lived have their own types of aloneness. In New York, you’re never really alone. Su asks me if I have any go-to places to cry. I say, no, often I’ll walk and cry. My go-to place, then, is everywhere. I don’t feel alone in New York because even when you feel like no one knows you exist, others have an awareness of you because you are one of many bodies in this shared place. In New Mexico, my body was so in tune with the landscape, that even when I woke up early in the morning to run, I never felt truly alone. 

Boston my aloneness was new. I hardly knew anyone when I moved there, beyond my partner at the time and some acquaintances who later would become great friends. Starting fresh, I thought to myself, but really I was scared. I worked the groove of solitude until I found a rhythm in my routines. People slowly filled in those gaps. In Iowa, to quote a great poet I read during my first semester, I was cruelly lonely. In New York, I don’t feel alone or lonely. When I do have those feelings, they tend to feel like respite rather than dread. Rather than those feelings, I notice absence more than my own solitude. To feel absence is to miss someone with your entire being. (I think of Rilke: the highest form of love is to be a protector of another’s solitude. And then Frank O’Hara, if there is / a place further from me / I beg you do not go.)

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Lately, I’ve wondered what it means when someone tells you they miss you. I miss you on the train, I miss you in the afternoon, I miss you in the morning, I miss you when I’m walking somewhere we used to go, I miss you in the minutes between labor and rest. Another friendship becomes long-distance. Birthday texts that include I love and miss you because another friend is far away from me. I find myself forgetting their faces and the way they said my name. 

On the train, I listen to “Rivers and Roads” by the Head and the Heart for the first time in years. Been talking about the way things change / Now my family lives in a different state. When I exit at Canal, I wipe my eyes and text my family. When you miss someone, you turn into a puddle of cliches. Til I reach you. 

When someone tells you they miss you, the timing of the message seems important. I pay attention to when the message arrives, try to imagine the conditions that prompted sending the message. I know a friend is going to a show, probably the kind we’d go to together. I get a message. Early in the morning, when you wake before your alarm, the space between sleep and wakefulness, is that when you remember me because I was once there beside you? 

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That day in Taos, maybe I missed the girl I was because I knew I wouldn’t be her again. A period of my life that had been long and filled with lessons was over. I’d move far away from most of my friends. We’d keep in touch in fits and bursts. I mourned for the stray dogs because I saw their freedom. Their manginess and their protruding ribs struck me as familiar. The hard facts of living I didn’t really know but carried within me every time I tortured my body to be something it wasn’t. They moved in packs around the pueblo. I lost my students for a while, but I knew they would be fine. They wouldn’t separate from each other even when I took my distance. They were on their own way to becoming adults. That is what summer camp is for, that brief flash of independence is a testing ground for all the time to come when you have no other choice but to be independent.  

I tried to listen to the creek. I couldn’t stop my mind from running. In a month, I would live in an entirely new state. I would move into an apartment where the morning light leaked onto the peeling linoleum and I would drink my coffee before commuting to a job I only took for the money. On the day of the interview, I severed the summer camp counselor version of me when I cut off the friendship bracelet one of my colleagues made. That world would feel entirely my own. I wouldn’t be the same person I was in the desert. I tried to behold the Virgin of Guadalupe inside the church, but I was inconsolable. Hours later, I felt like I had a religious experience. I couldn’t explain it beyond the conviction that the desert had magic powers. It inspired a sea change. What I couldn’t define then I can clearly see now. I was beginning to grow up, for real this time. 

Whoever I’d be in the next place would learn to not mourn for this passage of self to new self. There was a part of me that knew this was the first of many selves. I would need to learn to keep moving because the alternative was impossible. I thought of Maggie Nelson’s question in The Argonauts—if the parts change, is it still the same ship or a new one altogether? When you see me again, will you see how I’ve changed? Will you recognize me at all?

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As I write this, I remember what the stranger said: Freedom exists in the space between people. 

I don’t if I believe that’s true. But I repeated it into the air so eventually I’d remember. Fragmentary, I had said, but have forgotten where that led. This morning, a streak of pink as it appears on the window frame. Dawn finally arrived. I point to the light almost imperceptible, but here regardless.