Nodding Terms

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand...

[ournoddingterms]

Nashville

In Chapel Hill this weekend, I felt at home. The humidity settled on my shoulders and back as I trundled across campus like an old sweater, slightly uncomfortable but beloved nonetheless. (In Nashville, it is humid too, but the culture is to say cloistered in air conditioning.) I marveled over how the sidewalks unfurl uninterrupted for miles down Franklin and then Carrboro’s Main Street, from Café Driade to Open Eye. My former roommate’s minimalist abode, on the second floor of a charmingly decrepit house, made me want to get rid of everything except for books, and then devote all of my life to reading them, which in turn gave me the same sense of possibility— grad school! writing! traveling! — that propelled me during college, even when I was miserable.  The only thing impeding my bliss was a hum of anxiety, a counterargument that there are many possibilities, but I might choose the wrong one, poking a hole in my silly 23-year-old heart and happiness.

As has often been the case when I go elsewhere, I felt guilty when people asked me about Nashville, their question usually imbued with excited curiosity inspired by New York Times trend pieces or a love for Americana music. “It’s nice,” I answered, on the porch of the grad students’ house, under the awning at Weaver Street market, across from the apartment I used to live in, sipping a Chai Masala. “It’s nice, but…”

More than people, I want to tell you about places. It might be because I spent impressionable years in Chapel Hill, where “sense of place” punctuates so many syllabi. (I know — we are still in the impressionable years.) And so I should be happy to tell you about Nashville, but my whole problem with it is that it is amorphous and impossible to grab onto and I still don’t know much about Nashville at all. 

Part of the reason I chose Nashville, or at least part of the way that I rationalized my choice, is that Nashville could be My City. New York  — the first city I claimed as my own — is so obviously so many else’s. My parents lived there when they were 23. My aunts did. My cousins and my grandparents and so on and so on. Part of its attraction is it is filled with people who also Chapel Hill. The same goes for DC, and San Francisco. But no one I knew knew Nashville.

But Nashville and I have met in the same awkward stage of life, unknowable to ourselves and each other.  I am 23, and I feel a pressure to choose a path that I didn’t feel while I was in college. I cannot have a job that simultaneously permits the kind of lifestyle I aspire to (a well-kept house, travel, the occasional new pair of jeans, stability and excitement — does this exist?), and the kind of outfits I tend to put on each morning,  (today, a too-short sailboat dress I bought in high school; yesterday, a white t-shirt with a whole in the armpit). I want to spend hours in libraries going down rabbit holes and practicing things I might never do in real life (fiction writing? poetry?), and I also want to contribute to the world.  I say I am paralyzed, but in reality, that is not true; inertia is carrying me to one pole. If I am not careful, it will be to the exclusion of everything at the other.   

Nashville, too, wants things that can be balanced, but no one here knows how. It wants beautiful single family houses and boutique coffee shops and to boast of a growing economy. But it also wants to be affordable to the people who make it “cool,” and to maintain the twang and ‘otherness’ of the music that was its attraction for so many. It is at a crossroads, and rather than meaningfully taking stock of where it stands, it is following the money. 

This weekend in Chapel Hill,  I talked to a girl who has lived in the area her entire life. She said the town hasn’t changed very much for decades. That  isn’t to say it’s perfect, that the consequences of Nashville’s “gentrification” are absent; nor is it to say the area is stagnant. But Chapel Hill is easier to get a handle on, which maybe makes it easier to love. Nashville is changing so fast. How can I feel that it belongs to me or vice versa when know one knows yet what the city will be? Selfishly, when the growth manifests itself in something I might use — a craft brewery two blocks from our apartment, a New York deli around the corner, I rejoice. But more often, I wonder who these developers are catering to, with their cocktail bars and artisan juice shops and butchers and luxury condos (how many can one part of town possibly need!?).

This kind of aimless and maybe heartless growth breeds nastiness. Once, I sat down in my favorite coffee shop — itself buried under a layer of new condos priced for people in Nashville’s negligible financial industry. It was before 7:30, but all the tables but one had at least one person sitting down. I sat down at the vacant table, which was caddy corner to a lady with a floppy sun hat even though it was winter, and a tie-dye skirt. She was reading a black tome that looked like the Bible, but was actually about Narcotics Addiction. I  was compiling the morning newsletter and occasionally staring into space, when she snapped at me to stop staring. She yelled, “I bet you’re not even from here!,” and stormed off, stuffing her book into her bag, before I could explain myself.

The quiet coffeeshop all turned and stared. My simmering embarrassment threatened to turn into tears, as strangers assured me the woman was “crazy.” Maybe she was crazy, but maybe she was just scared; maybe she can’t afford to live here anymore practically, and was unsure where she might hang her floppy hat. That day I was heading to the legislature, wearing my working clothes. Maybe to her I was the symbol of the moneyed forces of change with unknown motives.

Last week, I was sitting on the stoop of my apartment with boyfriend and the couple who lives upstairs. Back from a run, I was drenched with the humidity, like you should be in the summer. Our neighbor mentioned that the apartments’ manager had called saying the complex was being sold. We speculated what would happen to it: its sloping grass lawns and tall trees are surely valuable without its squat, aging apartments. I recalled a book I liked when I was little, about a town that was flooded to make a reservoir. I pictured all of our homes being swept away in the name of business interests and production. It will be a disaster for the families who live in the Section 8 units in our complex— the last Section 8 units in Nashville in safe neighborhoods with decent schools. 

Whatever the new owners decide to do, it will not be a disaster for me. When my lease ends, I expect I will be ready to leave not just my apartment, but the city. I wonder if at that point, I’ll know and love the city I’ve consigned behind.

[ournoddingterms]

"The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished"

Joan Didion. THIS IS US, GUYS. RIGHT NOW (except for lil’ Gayatri. Corinne is close enough). We are the girls with the too-long skirts who will one day haunt our older selves.

How embarrassing.

[ournoddingterms]

Anxiety and Bird Poop

When I ran track as an underclassman in high school, I obsessively counted laps and portions of laps to get through races. The white lines on the black track soothed me through mid-distance sprints, and I always ran my hardest just after I had made it halfway through. Somehow my breathing would become secondary, and my legs would just move. My mind has always been unable to control my body, but somehow it worked in those moments of power and ponytail swishing and leg kicking.

I had the thought the other day that I missed living in fractions. It has been a year since I graduated college. The years were always tidily divided between school and summer. Summer internships came with a three-month expiration. Now I most likely face more than seventy years of uncertainty. It is low-key terrifying. It was one of those thoughts that encapsulates every uneasy thing I have felt recently. I wrote it down in my notebook.

I have so much doubt about how I am living my life. I wonder if my childhood self saw me, if she would be repulsed or proud. Anxiety seeps through the folds of my brain, but it is not the exciting butterfly-filled kind that keeps you awake the night before the first day of school, but the foggy brand that makes you sleep so you don’t have to confront your fear. I feel guilty every time I eat lunch out instead of bringing it from home, because I would save so much money that I could spend on plane tickets and beer and maybe even my retirement fund. I worry that my job is in the wrong field and I know that I am not building the skills I want to. I choose books that I relate to, instead of ones that expand my worldview. In my first year out of school, the first year that is The Rest of My Life, I am totally stuck in my own head, guilty that I have not progressed as much as what I see in my friends, the ones with whom, up until now, I have shared every step.

***

I receive that notebook as a gift for my tenth birthday from my friend B. Her parents are both art historians, so she always gives beautiful things as presents. She often makes watercolor and collaged cards, and her mom once tells me I should try out for the lead in “My Fair Lady” at my school because she thinks I resemble Audrey Hepburn (laughable, but so sweet!) She is the curator at one of our city’s few museums, and lets me try on antique clothing (lace gloves, delicate hats, brooches) from its archives. I so do not deserve their kindness. One time, I tell my mom about how I feel bad for B.’s family because their house smells bad.

I grow apart from B. in high school and talk to her maybe once in college, because I am embarrassed by how weird she and my other former best friends from elementary school have become. I feel that I have outpaced them in my development to becoming if not cool, at least socially acceptable. They are all obsessed with Japan, wear jean capris far past the trend’s expiration date and do not wash their hair enough. Most of us all end up at the same college. They stay the same, I hang out with new people and get drunk and go to concerts and join the newspaper.

One day in April of junior year, a bird poops on my knee. I hate birds. It is a sunny day and campus is idyllic, like an animated brochure. I am three months removed from four months of European travel, and a ball of anxiety over what I see as my First Great Heartbreak and, more importantly, the endless emails and applications I need to finish to find a summer internship.

(I now know that this is a pattern for me, being frozen in the gulf between melodramatic, misplaced nostalgia toward the past and an overly pragmatic approach to the future. If my apartment had an in-unit washer/dryer and if I finally learn to make a proper roast chicken, then everything will be okay).

I start crying about the poop, but really about my preternatural stress, and I look over my shoulder to see who might see me and spot R., another friend from my former cohort. I get her attention.

“Can you come to the bathroom with me? I need some help with this fucking poop,” I beg.

She walks to the bathroom with me, and pulls the paper towels from the dispenser and gets them wet for me. She gives me a curt pat on the back while I rub the poop off my jeans.

I am being mothered by someone I thought I had, in some ways, surpassed.

We walk down stairs out of the building, and I ask her how she is doing. She talks about her boyfriend, and her plans to teach English in Japan after college. I tell her I’d love to get dinner sometime, and she smiles weakly. When we leave in opposite directions, she waves like a salute, a mannerism I viscerally remember as essentially R.

I spend the rest of the day in a shaken haze, wondering if I would be happier if I had followed my elementary school friends’ path.

***

I have written in my notebook sporadically since the summer after freshman year of college. When I read old entries (that are always so overwrought! This will probably seem overwrought in a week!), I can see how I learned countless new things about the world and about myself each semester. I remember how I felt renewed when I traveled, and how I started college having left the country only once in my life. I think about the new relationships I had formed in the four years of college and the year that has passed since. I think about the towering, industrial dorms and charming-in-a-tumbledown way houses I lived in then, and the homey houseplant-filed co-op that I rent now.

I sit in the park across the street and read a lot of the time after work when it’s warm, and I think that I never predicted I would live across the street from a tree-filled park with fountains and waterfalls at 22 and how beautiful it is and how it is such a nice surprise.

[ournoddingterms]

[ournoddingterms]

Our House

My mother sent me a picture of my youngest brother eating breakfast at our local bakery at 7:50 a.m. eastern time yesterday, a Saturday. “Mom, that’s weird,” my brother —  who normally sleeps until noon or even after, unless he has a team workout —reportedly said upon the picture being taken. He’s lucky she didn’t take a selfie.

The reason my mother and brother were having some quality bonding time so early in the morning is that yesterday, our house went on the market, and — before the sign even went into the yard — five families made appointments to look at it. Two of the families stayed wandering our house for longer than an hour, my mother bragged to me on the phone.

Of course they stayed as long as they could!  It’s a beautiful house, despite the collage of stickers peeled from apples and bananas over the past decade on our kitchen wall, the mud that we seem to track everywhere, and the post-it note my sister put on the ceiling years ago when testing each other’s gullibility was of neverending amusement that reads “Gullible.” It is in a great location:  half a mile from the elementary school, and only a little more to the local art museum and university. It’s equidistant from two of my best friend’s childhood homes, although I suppose this will not be its selling point. It’s large, even though I shared a tiny room with my sister until I was sixteen and my brothers shared an even tinier room until I went to college. When my parents bought it when I was six — the first house they ever bought; before that, we lived in apartments the size of where I live now — I was disappointed because I thought the Tudor style was  dark and creepy, and the bulky boxwood bushes outside were ugly. I have long since changed my mind.

My youngest brother is a freshman in high school, so he is the only one of us who will ever actually live in the new house, which is a mile away and ironically, since most of us are “grown up,” larger than our old house. He’s excited; my other brother, about to go off to college, who should be the most nostalgic of all of us, is excited; my sister the philosophy major is prenaturally zen and resistant to angst.

I am playing a role I’ve been refining my entire life as the sensitive one, the dramatic one, the overthinker. When my mom sends me pictures of the emptying house (she sends a lot of pictures), I cry, although, in an effort to be mature,  I don’t tell her to stop, because I don’t want to hurt her feelings.

Joan Didion said something about people who keep notebooks; that they are “born with a presentiment with loss.” This is me, to an embarrassing extent. When I was little, I cried when my dad cut down a small tree in the backyard because it was killed by a lightning strike, and I became sentimental when old couches and bulky TVs were donated to Goodwill. An old family legend is how my older cousin was inconsolable when his family got a new furnace, even though he had never noticed the only one. It was supposed to be funny, but I always understood where he was coming from. I’ve said it here before: I am wired for nostalgia, even when I’m not sure what is prompting it.

But, unlike in my attachment to old TV sets (which happily, I’ve outgrown), I’m not alone in attachments to houses. In a recent episode of This American Life, Lindy West described how before her father died, the hardest she’d ever cried was the day her parents left her childhood home. My friends whose parents have moved feel the same way I do, and have warned me of the shock of coming home to some place where you don’t know where the towels are (see below). Physical structures whose claim to fame is that they housed someone’s childhood loom large in literature:  Anne’s Green Gables; the Weasley’s Burrow; Elizabeth Bowen’s House in Paris; the Brideshead Evelyn Waugh’s characters revisited.

As Lindy West pointed out in the same episode, a house is not a person. But, it reminds you of people, or in the absence of people, reminds you of what they might have had they not left. To wit: the boxwoods outside of our house  render a smell that sometimes transport me to lemonade sales in 2001, and sometimes reminds me of my grandfather’s insistence of cutting them on the visits he made yearly before he died.  Our house was — somewhat inexplicably to me, since privacy was a non-option — the gathering place of choice for my high school friends, and the basement reminds me of long nights and specific conversations with people whom I no longer speak to regularly, but still think about. The place where the swingset reminds me of a conversation my friend and I had there after a classmate died in the first grade about the meaning of life. Will those memories be lost without their physical markers? Likely not, now that I’ve written them down. But I can’t write everything down quickly enough.

Every one of my posts has been written from someplace else or about someplace else, because being away from home can provide clarity. Conversely, being home clouds my vision with combinations of everything I have ever felt.

Maybe it is better to say goodbye now, then years from now, when a parent dies — the terms on which my parents will have to bid farewell to their own childhood homes. Maybe not having the physical house right now will clear my mind of mental clutter (after all, my mom keeps reminding us, moving is about getting rid of clutter — does anyone want my American Girl dolls?) , and allow me to hold onto the memories I only real need. And it is certainly better to be far away as the house is packed up and transferred to someone new, so I don’t have to a stage for my mourning to play out in the most dramatic way.

But I hope the next family is someone nice; someone who stays there even longer than we did; someone who will answer when I knock on the door years from now and let me take a look inside.

[ournoddingterms]

On Change

I went back home to North Carolina last month, taking advantage of a three-day weekend and some rollover vacation days, with no plans but to chill. It was no one’s birthday, there is no obscure Hindu holiday in the middle of February – I just hadn’t been home since Thanksgiving, and I missed it. Can I live? But every time I walked to my kitchen that lazy weekend, looking for a spoon or a bowl or some crackers, I had to ask my parents where they were. I used a different, brand-new towel every time I showered because I simply could not find the normal ones and didn’t want to bother my mother, whose leg was in a boot. I did not know the fastest way from the main road to my house.

Because it wasn’t my house. Last May I graduated from college in a flurry of panic and nostalgia and I moved back in with my parents, along with a good handful of my friends. I am very conscious of the privilege that comes with being able to do that at all, to live expense-free in a comfortable home while searching for a job that fits and has upward trajectory and feels meaningful. But this does not mean it wasn’t hard, especially as the “whee!” freedom of having nothing to do but apply for jobs and wait wore off and was replaced by a sharp, terrifying anxiety.

While I sat in bed and ate junk food and cried, mostly, my parents were slowly packing up our house and taking everything – clothes, art, furniture, etc. – ten minutes down the highway to another, bigger house. I’ve moved a lot in my life; I lived in three different countries before I was five years old, and six towns since then. Packing up and leaving comes naturally to me, and though I form attachments (easily!) to people, the fact that until we moved to Cary, I had never lived in one place for longer than three years meant that physical spaces blur over quickly. I never painted the walls of my many rooms.

But in the spring of 2008, I invited two friends over to my house to help me paint my room a soft, sunshiny yellow. We listened to ABBA and gossiped about high school things and I got paint on Lillian’s shorts, something she will never forget. We are all still best friends.

A lot of people came through that house – my mother helped girls that even I barely knew get dressed to go dancing, and my father took the photos. Friends would come over after school, to do homework, or during lunch, to raid the fridge for leftovers. My parents met best friends who function more as extended family members, and these friends were always over, singing, eating, comparing gossipy notes on each others’ children. The summer after sophomore year my grandparents visited, and I shared with them the life I live here for likely the last time.

I watched the walls go from off-white to green, the floors go from carpet to wood. A hole I made in the wall as an angry teenager was filled in and painted over, the new color just different enough that I would always notice it and cringe. College was close enough that I could come home when I wanted, and senior year I did that every Sunday so that I could sit in my sunroom and teach a five-year old how to read.

It wasn’t a beautiful house or a fancy one, but it was home, and when I went back last month I felt incredibly struck by the fact that from here on out, going home will mean going someplace eerily devoid of memories. While I was there my mother told me that home will always be where my parents are, which is true (“home is where the heart is blah blah blah”), but I’ve always been probably too obsessed with the significance of tangible things as vessels for memories and love. And I know this is something almost everyone has to deal with at some point or another, but I live with strangers in a cold, confusing city and I’ve been here for almost 6 months but it still doesn’t feel like mine; I’m still too prone to walking around feeling underdressed and overstimulated. I know that will probably change, but for now I hate that I can’t even comfort myself with the thought that I can always buy a ticket and go back to the place that functioned as the backdrop for so much of my becoming.

[ournoddingterms]

Israel

The sky is primitive and endless. It is the first time I have ever noticed its curve: an inert boomerang bridging the desert. There are stars everywhere. There are no original ways left to describe how the stars look (scattered pearls, freckles, embers), because thousands of years of people before me have been dazzled by them. The stars have been the same for aeons, still beholden to some spiritual significance notwithstanding the miles of scientific evidence attempting to explain them away. We know why there are rocks and slugs and stars.

The four of us are lying on the ground and looking up. I tell them about Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot,” because I want to seem knowledgeable and deep. One of my companions pulls up an astronomy app on his iPhone to decode the constellations. He wants to feel useful.

I am not sure whether I feel tiny or huge. In such a barren landscape, there are no boundaries except scattered brush, rolling mounded hills, and the clear, shining sky. There are no roads or sidewalks or even footpaths directing you, no noise, save for the camels’ snores and drunks’ laughs (the others who have “snuck out” from our campsite), and the darkness is not a fearful trap, but it is freeing. I am giddy and directionless. I can see the Big Dipper, so I know which way is North. I think about the slaves from the American South following the Drinking Gourd to the Ohio River. Today, it is Christmas Eve 2014, in the Negev Desert, in the South of Israel. It is such a tiny country. Though I am only traveling for 10 days, I have seen its borders with Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. Standing on one bank of the Dead Sea, Jordan’s coast is visible. It would be a small river in North Carolina.

America quickly conquered, or plundered, the West, winning over pioneers with Manifest Destiny ideology and murdering the Native Americans with guns and smallpox and rape. Native Americans, who once designed some of the worlds’ most powerful and sophisticated societies, have lived terribly since. The land is vast, but they easily swept away the truth from the forefront of our national consciousness. Maybe this is because our capital, Washington, DC, is 1,574 miles from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. It is hard to be heard from such a distance, and easy to lie when you will never see those you are hurting.

Israel is 263 miles from top to bottom, and 9.3 miles wide at its narrowest point. On our drive into the desert, we can see on the side of the road the rockets that had launched into Gaza that summer. “Operation Protective Edge,” the Israelis called it. A flashy term to disguise the danger to those cowering in Gaza. It is hard to say if it is more oppressive or more evil or more amoral to do terrible things at such close proximity. Our tour guide, a practitioner of yoga, tai chi, and vegetarianism, says that Muslims do not value life in the same way that Jews, or anyone else, do. The hatred and the violence are upfront: not diminished, but amplified by this honesty. In a country the size of New Jersey, there is no room to conceal these attitudes. I am glad that my identity is not invested in my Jewishness to a great extent. But at the same time, I am an American and I have worked hard to make sure Americans vote. I am culpable for how things are, and how they will be, good or bad.

Out of all of this, all I can concentrate on are the mysteries of geography and space. How Russia is allowed to be so big, and how so many people fit into Bangladesh, and how Rhode Island and Texas are both states. I can see the stars, unquantifiable distances away, but in the darkness, I can barely see those lying near me. I can feel them, breathing, blinking, emitting warmth. And, to some extent, I can feel the sky’s weight, or at least, the stars’ white light reflecting in my eyes.

He lies perpendicular to me, his head just inches from my stomach. We are wearing each other’s shirts, because he had asked to borrow my flannel earlier that evening. I am conscious of my heartbeat and of my stomach moving up and down with my breaths. Always, my breathing syncs up with whomever I am physically closest to. It is unsettling and unmasking, and I hope that it happens, concurrently, to everyone else.

[ournoddingterms]

Dispatches from Denver

Right now I am in Denver, which is at once a three-hour flight from my city and, pardon the cliché, a world away. My city — my entire geographical region — has been shut down for nearly two weeks because of less than an inch of snow and a lot of ice.  In Denver, they’ve had the snowiest February in a century, the weather is 18 degrees, and people are jogging and bike riding and being outside in a way my neighbors at home only do on the prettiest days of the year.  The air is dryer, which somehow makes the cold and, I’ve been told, the summertime heat, more bearable. 

From history books and my job, I am familiar with the distrust of government that pops up in the South periodically throughout the years, often in bloody and epochal ways. A visit to the Colorado legislature with a colleague suggests that, for all the hippiness, the same distrust is built into the DNA here. They might have a fancy art museum and vegetarian and Peruvian cuisine, but this is still the Wild Wild West:  Democrats are anti-gun control; Republicans pro-pot. Before I started snowing, mountains were on the horizon of this otherwise flat city, looking like a pop-up book. Maybe because I just finished my first Wallace Stegner novel, maybe because I began romanticizing Denver last year, after a family trip to Ecuador made me want to see more mountains, I instantly love this place.

Because I am here for work, I’m not getting to explore, or to go into the mountains, and so I know I Have to Come Back. This overwhelms me. Sometimes it feels like I spend my entire life thinking of all the Places I Have to Go and All the Things I Must Listen To and Watch and Read, and in planning and doing so I don’t do enough of it. I know I’m not alone in this — that’s why there was the cringe-worthy term FOMO; it’s why mindfulness is regularly on featured in the newsweeklies I want more time to read — and I know I’m not the first to expound on this feeling of overstimulation, but still it is preoccupying and sometimes crippling, and I’ve heard writing about things can make things better.

My unease with time is on two levels: the daily and the lifetime. In my days, I feel like it is hard to do justice to my boyfriend and my friends, and my work, and my running, and my “inner life” of reading and writing. I puzzle over how anyone is ever a parent. I want more friends, a more diverse social life, but don’t know where that would fit in. I’m not trying to be like one of those college kids always talking about how busy they are, because I’m aware I’m not. I just seem to lose hours the way I lose my wallet or keys (incidentally, many of my hours are in fact spent looking for my wallet and keys.)

And then in my lifetime: I want to live abroad, in Europe and on continents I’ve never been to. I want to write beautiful things. I want to come back to Denver and go to Wyoming and go on a backpacking trip in the mountains and spend as much time with my family as I can, and go on a fun trip across the world with one of my best friends, and never grow apart from anyone — forget Dunbars number,  I want time for every friend I’ve ever made. One day I want kids, and I want them to have a strong sense of hometown like I do. But that means staying still, which means I have to fit everything else in what, the next ten years, the next fifteen? I type this and I know this anxiety is ridiculous, that my older self will laugh at this. I know I need to read the books on Mindfulness.

Being 22 means you are constantly the youngest. Three times on this trip to Denver, colleagues and other journalists have asked me how old I am or what year I was born in. When I tell them, they’ve replied with things like “You were never alive when there was a Soviet Union!” or “I was in fifth grade when you were born!”  I’m not offended, because I can tell they're more shocked by their own advanced age than my youth. I feel like this should allay my feelings of Running Out of Time, Not Having Enough. These people don’t seem so much older than me, but they have switched careers three times, lived in different countries, gotten married, had kids, and are not yet ready to throw in the towel.

I am at the beginning, and the months that might turn into years spent in places not very different from where I grew up are not wasted. I know this, I know this, I know this.  

It seems like an impossibly privileged problem, but something I’ve struggled with insatiable hunger, or what I think is insatiable hunger in the moment and shortly afterward realize is not, and am filled with regret, and worse, shame, and even worse, when other people are let in on it and just want me, for my own sake, to be better and stop, guilt. This is how my relationship with food (oof, what a phrase) seems programmed to be, even after years and years of work. For the first time, literally as I type this, I see how this insatiability  extends to the rest of my life.

I’m sitting in a boutique hotel in downtown Denver, and I’m only 22 and I’ve made it here, and I am full. I have enough.

[ournoddingterms]

2/25/15

As I am walking tothe coffee shop on the quaint main street of the town where I will soon write this, I am miserable. Wrapped in an inadequate amount of layers, I stare at the ground, not wanting to lift my head for fear of getting snow blown in my face.  Everyone I come across outside sports a similar grimace.  The North Carolina mountain town I call home with its New England winters wears away at morale. Bit by bit, as subtly as the snow builds up along the streets, everyone’s false mask of happiness disappears.

I wonder, is this the truest version of ourselves? Emotional walls knocked down by the cold?  A transparent view into our feelings, without the fake smiles. I feel strangely in place, for once.  I’m sick of pretending – isn’t everyone else?

[ournoddingterms]

February

My rib cage feels cavernous, the bend of my waist untouched for months on end. I twist my dry split ends, the heater whirs. I dash off a half-assed text message reply to someone I am sort of pretending to be into. I get a Facebook notification of an ex’s birthday. I stare out my window at the row houses of Florida Avenue and watch the snow turn to a muddied slush as it reaches the road.

I hear my roommate and her boyfriend laugh in the next room. It’ll be better when February is over and spring can start, she tells me. I picture tan legs and enjoying boozy picnics in the park across the street from my apartment, glistening with sweat that will leak out of my pores to remind me that I have something inside of me. I think about reading a book on a park bench on a Saturday afternoon and not once checking my phone and even eating an apple of my own accord.

I feel wildly homely wearing tights under my pants every day, trudging down Sixteenth Street on my way to work. Sometimes I see giddy couples walk out of their apartments still high off each other from the night before and think maybe I would have more sex if I wasn’t wearing tights under my pants all the time. I come up with a lot of stupid answers like that. I even wear nice underwear to a housewarming party, just in case the host finally decides he is into me. I practice flirting with the cashiers at Trader Joe’s, trying to distract from my purchase of white cheddar popcorn, beer and frozen Indian food.

I buy a tiny bottle of Fireball at the liquor store Friday night. The booze is behind a wall of bulletproof glass. When the cashier looks at my ID, he says I have a pretty smile. I roll my eyes and bolt. 

[ournoddingterms]

2/22/15

Four dots, all in a line, just above my hipbone. Scars now, I suppose. But good scars, if you believe those exist.

It’s been nearly two years, and they’re still there. A constant reminder of an exhilarating and freeing chapter of my life.

I can’t help feeling a sad sort of longing at times when I catch a glimpse of them.

What is it exactly I pine for? Newness? That high, soaring sort of feeling of breaking all the rules? Am I bored of consistency? Fearing my life is stagnating before my eyes? 

Questions I'd rather run from than think about. 

[ournoddingterms]

At The Beginning (Lest I Forget)

I see the way you look at me, and I know you see the way I look at you, and we know what we’re doing; we know we’re letting each other in. We’re both self-conscious about being stared at but we let it happen anyway, because we want to stare back. What are you thinking? we ask each other, and we reply with simple, sweet things, things that have only one meaning: I think I like you.  

We are hungry to understand each other, and flashes of insight come both solicited (What is your mom like? Who did you hang out with in high school?) and unexpectedly (I can’t believe you like Stevie Nicks!). We make each other laugh. We were lonely, before.

We cannot stop touching each other -- on the subway, on the street, in our beds. Our hands are intertwined, or our thighs are grazing, or more. When we’re not together our thumbs tap on two screens miles apart and so we know what the other is doing and thinking.

I want to write this down because it’s all happening fast, maybe too fast, and maybe I’ve been listening to too much Taylor Swift but I can’t help but worry that it’ll end the same way. Or not worry, exactly, but prepare for subconsciously. He does not get to have all of you at once, I remind myself, speaking in a sense broader than sexual. But for the most part I don’t think about being careful because the beginning feels so good. I want to remember it.

[ournoddingterms]

Chattanooga

We now live in the same city and often spend days on end together. We probably don’t have enough friends outside of ourselves — no one to get away from except for each other. But still, going away with each other seems like a treat, even if “away” is two hours south on the interstate. Chattanooga is appealing because of its nonsensical name, which for me renders pictures of Indians (the non p.c. ones from the Westerns he loved when he was little)  and trains with red cabooses.

In two days we will be buried in a record breaking ice storm, but when we set off on Saturday morning for a three-day weekend, it is nearing 50 degrees. It’s only 10 a.m., but I’ve already run 8 miles and I feel lean and strong and almost deserving of love. I certainly feel deserving of a treat. These are things that I (and most people, maybe?) rarely feel. When I don’t feel good enough, my disappointment in myself is compounded by the guilt I feel for making him feel guilty for making me feel inadequate, even though he hasn’t. It’s silly that in trying not to hurt the other, we inflict guilt, a type of hurt.The guilty are supposed to be the inflicters, not the inflictees. These are the silly things I am beginning to think people in relationships can’t avoid, although I’m young and inexperienced and so I can’t say for sure.

Maybe I like going places with him because of the shared daydreaming involved. At home, I’m always asking, “what are you thinking about? what do you dream about?” and he smiles and shakes his head. Here, I can ask more concrete questions about the future because they’re obviously hypothetical. We can indulge in shared daydreams. Could we live here? What neighborhood would we live in? Do we see people who we would be friends with? What craft breweries would we frequent? 

At our age,  talking about the future is futile, even when the relationship is serious. After the obvious chapters dividing up childhood and college, created by school years and study abroad,  it’s not clear how long this chapter in our lives will be. How long will we inhabit this space of  the first post-college city, our first jobs?  I imagine at some point in one’s late-20s, the  sense of being in the same chapter, even on the same page returns: the ready-to-settle, roots-already-breaking-through-soil-chapter.  But no matter how good a relationship is when you’re our age, that feeling can’t happen, not for people like us. There’s always the uncertainty that’s at once a benefit of  being young and a burden.

Right now, it doesn’t matter. We’re in Chattanooga for the weekend, and we know we’ll share this little story’s beginning, middle, and end. We go to the zoo, and we drive across bridges while singing at the top of our lungs, and we are each other’s best friends. We drive to the top of Lookout Mountain and stand and look at the small city folded out before us, toy-like, just like its name. We didn’t have anything we needed a break from; we’re too young to have left responsibilities behind.

[ournoddingterms]

Two Kinds of Southern

I moved to New York City from North Carolina four months ago, and whenever anyone asks where I’m from -- which is all the time in this city, where meeting a native New Yorker is rarer than meeting someone from the Ozarks, or Mongolia -- my eyes light up as I say, “oh, I’m from North Carolina.” Or, “I’m from the South, from North Carolina.” This is never met with an, “oh I love North Carolina!” or even, “oh, that’s cool!”, but I love saying it the way people love showing off their most important friends or lovers or pets, when their pride is so strong that the opinions of outsiders are laughably irrelevant.

But what does it mean to feel fierce belonging to a place that, despite all its warmth (in temperature as well as disposition), might not consider you one of its own due almost exclusively to the color of your skin? To identify, in many ways, as Southern and know that saying so raises eyebrows because your name is Gayatri and you are not white or black, but something else?

The South exists as a collective identity in troublesome ways. People who are not even from the United States know that it’s where racists and tobacco thrive; where gays cannot marry and people fight for their right to keep evolution out of public schools; where a little over a century ago, thousands of men took up arms to defend their right to enslave fellow human beings. Gorgeous plantation homes built on the blood and sweat of people who were actually property, the same as horses or plows. North Carolina in particular was home to Senator Jesse Helms, who called homosexuals “weak, morally sick wretches” and the Civil Rights Act “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.” It is where, more recently, legislators suggested that the state may be able to declare Christianity the state religion despite the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

I know plenty of people who struggle to come to terms with their inherent Southernness in the face of the facts listed above, people who identify as liberal and tolerant and therefore cringe at the truly horrendous things their Southern ancestors said and did. The American South is in their blood the way south India is in mine; it’s what we are made of, embedded in the muscle memory of our souls. They write pages, essays, whole books about learning to accept themselves without apology while simultaneously wanting to apologize constantly for the place they are from. They know in their hearts that love can never be unconditional.

How odd it feels, then, to feel affection for a place that I am under no obligation to love! There’s no need for me to say, for example, “it’s a screwed up place with a screwed up past, but it’s mine, goddamn it, and I love it all the same,” because no one assumes it’s mine. I lived in North Carolina from ages 7 to 21. I might love I happened to spend those formative years -- except isn't it conventional for over-emotional, lonely girls to resent where they're from?

I think there’s something in my DNA that draws me to the South. I love the pace of it, the languorous accents and the slow-cooked beans and the seasons that are never in a hurry to settle in. I love Southerners’ overly fine-tuned sense of place, how it juxtaposes with my inability to ever really know where I am or where I’m going (literally). The penchant for too-many-words, and, therefore, too-long-stories. Even the humidity, deep in the thick of summer, which makes my curly Indian hair frizz up like a halo. I am in turns easygoing and high-strung, deeply independent yet obsessed with the largeness and over-involvement of my family. The South suits me fine.

As someone who lived and grew up in North Carolina, too, I am rich in memories. I miss walking through the woods that hem in the suburbs right after it rains and trying to suck the juices out of as many honeysuckle flowers as possible. Cheerwine and front porch gliders and the way Chapel Hill smells so strongly of tea olive in September, graceful and sweet. Watching the Atlantic roll onto the shores of Topsail Island in July and then, a few months later, watching quiet, wet snow blanket the Blue Ridge. Going to the Raleigh Farmer’s Market with my mother on Saturday mornings, inhaling jasmine and buying peaches. My first real concert at Koka Booth in Cary, The Avett Brothers headlining and singing about Concord, where they’re from. Going to the Krispy Kreme on Peace Street for a dozen hot doughnuts at 10 p.m.; running through the coffee-colored creek behind Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem with seven other 12 year old girls, giggling and singing. The nights I was a part of families far more Southern than mine (that is to say, actual Southern families), reveling in both the charming gentlemen and the glittering old women who warned us girls against them.

Do I love the South in, as John Jeremiah Sullivan has said, the way only an outsider can? Do I love it because I don’t look the part, because I like challenging both Southerners and outsiders by claiming to be from the South? Am I unhealthily obsessed with unrequited love, or am I overthinking it -- it’s 2015, can anyone be Southern and is it normal to have complicated identities like, “I was born in India and that’s where my family is from but I grew up in North Carolina and I love it but I’m a liberal vegetarian”?

Maybe. Probably. Maybe I love it tepidly, as an act of faith, knowing that when it feels like the South truly “hugs me back,” so to speak, is when it deserves my love wholeheartedly.

GS

[ournoddingterms]

New York/What is an existential crisis?

“I think I’m having an existential crisis,” I tell my sister as our train pulls out of Penn Station. “An existential crisis?” she replies. “As in, you don’t know whether or not you exist?” She’s 20 years old and a philosophy major. 

“No,” I say. “You know what I mean.” But how can she, when even I’m not sure? I wonder when people started using the phrase “existential crisis,” adopting academic language in an attempt to elevate and intellectualize the universal emotion of “freakin’’ out.”

I am possibly bugging because, after a 30-hour visit to New York City, I feel unsure that I am living in the right city, doing the right job, or even in the right career.

Or possibly I am freaking out because, when I said goodbye to two of the friends I was visiting in the city, I realized that seeing people in person is so much better than texts and e-mail and Skype, which I like to forget. I realized how strongly I missed living in the same place as them, and how desperately I want more friends like them. I am worried that friends like them do not congregate in Southern, sprawly cities like the one I live in.

I reach for the black and white cookie my sister and I had bought at the Hot and Crusty in Penn Station. It turns out that coffee and a cookie for the train ride to our grandma’s house on Long Island is a ritual we developed separately; a sign that, her sanguine personality notwithstanding, we are related after all. (Although she thinks Hot and Crusty is a great name for a bakery, and I think it’s gross.)

“Let’s wait until we get going,” my sister said, and so I put the cookie down. The train is moving, but we’re still underground. The cookie will taste better stretched out over the 48-minute train ride, with sunlight coming filtered the scratched train windows.

I wonder why they don’t sell black and white cookies in Nashville or North Carolina, where there are almost as many native New Yorkers in parts as there are native Southerners. Why are there no delis with macaroni and potato salads, and the cookies, bigger than faces, with sprinkles on them? Why doesn’t the native New Yorker’s black and white cookie conjure the same sentimentality among expats in the South as grits or tea do for Southerners in the North? My sister declares that, after her whole life of thinking she liked the chocolate side of a black and white better, she actually likes the white (is it lemon?). I still like the chocolate:

***

Mom picks us up from the train station in Farmingdale on foot.She needs to get chicken salad from the deli on Main Street, and wants to go in the old five and dime store, which has been there as long as she can remember, and is going out of business. Everything is half off, which is exciting since it is not really a five and dime store anymore, and has nice things like Pyrex containers and bedroom slippers that my mom will probably buy us if we go in with her. Still, although I only remember going into the store once before, I am sad it is closing; nostalgic as if this were my own hometown. I, like many of my friends — the type of friends who have congregated in New York — am predisposed to indulge in nostalgia and plan for the future simultaneously: contradicting compulsions.

My sister, either in spite of or because of her philosophy major,  has neither predisposition. On the train ride she said she admired my tendency to think deeply about things, which is a very charitable way to describe “overthinking,” or “being an anxious mess.”

***

My grandmother is very sick; much sicker than when I visited in June. We spend all day and evening in the living room and she never gets up from the hospital bed now set up in the middle of the room, not even to go to the bathroom. She can’t move her hands or head enough to read anymore. My grandma was always a prodigious newspaper reader.

When I was little, she said I was the only grandchild who would want to spend the whole summer with her — I could just sit in her living room all summer with my pile of books, and sometimes a bowl of strawberries and whipped cream, and be content. She was absolutely correct. I have always loved her house; the Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett on loop, the First Communion pictures, the Entenmann's crumb cake and pictures of angels and saints. We are too far removed from our immigrant roots to really identify with Italian or Irish culture, and, though I have lived in the South almost my entire life, that culture isn’t mine either. My grandma’s life and habits, this middle-class northeastern Americana — black and white cookies and Catholicism and stories about Brooklyn — formed my cultural identity. 

***

My older cousins live in my grandma’s house, in the bedrooms occupied by our mothers when they were little. My oldest cousin is developing a video game with virtual reality, which I didn’t knew was the type of technology that could possibly exist in anyone’s personal house, much less my grandmother’s house, that's reflection of the decades before I was born I have always felt comforting.

I put on the goggles and play different games. First, my cousin’s: I turn my head and see different orbs around me.  If I lean forward, I can look at them more clearly — just like real life. Sort of.

Second, one where I just have to press the spacebar, as long as I can bear it, as virtual knives come down on my hands, which are not really my hands  — they’re CGI, but where my hands should be. A spider is crawling toward me. To distract myself, I swivel in my chair.  I can turn 360 degrees and there is a whole office around me that doesn’t really exist. I turn back to the spider, hand still on the space bar. It crawls on my hand I can feel it, feel what I know is not a real spider crawling on my not-real hand. I shriek and take the goggles off.

“I felt it! I felt the spider!”

“That’s how it works!” my cousin says. He says the virtual reality plays tricks on your brain, makes you feel things you can’t really feel. Later, he owns up to brushing my hand when the spider appeared to be crawling on it. It reminds me of the time when I was four and he told me butterfingers were made of real fingers, and I believed him.

Still, I am unsettled. Unsettled by the feeling that we are on the verge of something, that the future is coming too fast, that these goggles could change everything. Already, I can see how in ten years, we’ll laugh when we remember this early model of virtual reality. ‘It was so clunky! So expensive!” It feels inevitable that this will become part of our lives, like iPhones and bluetooth.

My sister stays upstairs to play more games — you can go sea diving with the goggles, ride a roller coaster— but I go to bed, worried about the existential crises virtual reality will surely trigger. 

But there are patterns to the ways I react to the world, that I'm noticing more as I get older, and this is comforting.

-GT

[ournoddingterms]

Four

For me, it started with “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.”

A book series for teen girls turned film, the plot centers around a group of four lifelong best friends split apart for the summer for the first time. The girls have vastly different body shapes but magically fit into the same pair of thrift store blue jeans. Of course, the miraculous pants serve as a metaphor for the unshakable friendship the four share. It’s an aspirational friend group. I wanted to identify with the group and each girl more than almost anything else at the time.

Shamefully, I saw the movie first. I was 12 and convinced of my own literary sensibilities as the elixir that would eventually draw me out of my sprawling (in the particular way only southern cities are) North Carolina city.

I longed to be Bridget, nicknamed Bee and played by Blake Lively in the film. She was a tall soccer player with long, impossibly blond hair and a reckless glamour about her. I thought I might be a Lena, a beautiful, quiet artist, if I ever had the chance to go to Greece and fall in love, which I would express by painting the sea and sky with delicate watercolor strokes. I could be Tibby on my bad days, scornful and sarcastic. I knew I was Carmen. With untameable hair and a ferocious scowl, I was still angry at my divorced parents after so many years apart, and prone to impulsive acts of semi-violence to whomever was unfortunate to be dating them (Carmen threw a brick through a window, I told my stepdad when he was still my mom’s boyfriend to “get out of our lives”).

I discovered "Sex and the City" later, and a new way to classify women into four types. Speculating how I might be at 35 compared to how I was at 16 was hazy fun. Lena Dunham’s “Girls” shot to the forefront of pop culture debate when I was a sophomore in college, just beginning to experience the confusion of post-adolescence as Dunham’s characters ambled around Brooklyn.

What follows is an exchange between Shoshanna, a hyperactive NYU student, and her enigmatic British cousin Jessa, who has just returned from traveling.

Shoshanna: "Do you like the poster?" Jessa: "Oh, I've never seen that movie." Shoshanna: "Only the show?" Jessa: "Is it a show?" Shoshanna: "Oh my god. You're not serious. That's like not being on Facebook." Jessa: "I'm not on Facebook." Shoshanna: "You're so f---ing classy. You know, you're funny because you're definitely a Carrie, with like, some Samantha aspects, and Charlotte hair. That's like a really good combination." Jessa: "Well, thank you." Shoshanna: "I think I'm definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes ... sometimes Samantha kind of comes out. And then, when I'm at school, I definitely try to put on my Miranda hat."

Dunham includes this exchange to acknowledge the similarities between her show and “Sex and the City” upfront. But it also captures a conversation we’ve all had. A lot of us share this urge to self-classify. It can be a salve or a trap. Pop psychology enthusiasts sometimes swear by the Myers-Brigg typologies, also four categories of being. Based on the binaries of introversion/extraversion, intuition/sensing, feeling/thinking and perceiving/judging, Myers-Brigg tests tell us if we’re more like Mother Teresa or Joseph Stalin based on our predilection for each category. Clearly, we’re all a lot more complex than that. But it’s an easy answer that aligns us with characteristics bigger than what we think we exhibit in the day-to-day, provides easy fodder for the self-deprecating humor the BuzzFeed humor-espousing cohort is prone to. Introverts like blankets and avoiding text messages and cats. Extroverts like dancing on tables while Snapchatting their besties and downing shots.

That simplicity and those stark answers are what draws us to media portrayals of female characters that encapsulate what we wish for ourselves and, more darkly, dread about our self-presentation. Would I cry if a rude child interrupted my singing at a jazz brunch (a recent scenario on “Girls”)? Trying on these pop cultural tropes on for size allows us to place our own persona in relation those to our peers, when a real-life Miranda (who is the one we should all really want to be! A stable lawyer with an adorable husband! But her hair isn’t as shiny as Charlotte’s) would roll her eyes at every one of Carrie’s puns. 

Ten years after "Sisterhood," I find myself with three of my best female friends starting this blog. None of us are any of those girls. We live in four cities and have four lives and want to practice our writing while we muddle through our first jobs and last years of school. We have seen those shows and read that book and watched that movie, and we even referenced Joan Didion in the title of this blog. This is because we are unashamed and honest about the unoriginal things that have shaped our being. It is impossible and unnecessary to be original now. As consumers, we constantly repurpose what we have read or watched or heard until we are this weird amalgam of things that have already been created.

Dunham's recent memoir is entitled Not That Kind of Girl. I think when we're 22 and bombarded by Taylor Swift references, we're all just trying to figure out what kind of girl we want to be. What we will eat for breakfast, the boundaries we fence ourselves in by and allow ourselves to surmount, and the jobs we take all start to build brick by brick.

My worst habits are bragging about not exercising and drinking one unit past my limit. I do not know how to blow dry my hair. I mention the countries I have visited and the artists I love too much because I am insecure. I have tiny hands and a giant butt. The acne on my chin is stubborn. I feel guilt for loving cashmere and leather, cheeseburgers and brisket. I do not know whether these characteristics are original or derivative.

When I was little, my dad, brother and I played this game where we attempted to conjure up sentences that had never before been spoken. We sat in a row in my dad's truck, listening to Beck or Lucinda Williams, laughing so hard. We had huge arguments in Blockbuster over which movie to rent, but that would all go away with the game. One night, the agreed-upon best was "The sausage goddess worships milk." I slapped the words on our fridge with Magnetic Poetry. I smiled into my bowl of spaghetti and thought about what I wanted to watch on TV that night.

[ournoddingterms]

2/12/15

Scenes flit in and out of my head, often, and without warning. Nick Drake plays on vinyl while he discovers the body of a woman who is not me.  Dishes are scattered about the apartment, the remains of the sort of dinner I thought only we cooked together. She’s confident. Enthusiastic. Able to spout intelligence with no trouble at all. I can see it so clearly.

These thoughts hit me like a bus.  While sitting in class. While taking a shower. Packing up art to be shipped half way around the world. With his arms wrapped around me.

I long for the unbearable security of the early days.  The very opposite of indifference.  Sometimes I worry that indifference is all that’s left.  No, I tell myself.  We are bigger than this.  Our love exists outside of these betrayals.  Repeat like a mantra until I can make myself believe.

- E