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When it comes down to it, the turning point, the pain, will be in all the human misery we stepped over for the benefit of our sanity. It will be the person who exclaimed the subway car smelled bad, standing by a homeless man. It will be police officers throwing litter in the trash, tossing the tents and sleeping bags that at one point gave a person some passing semblance of control over their belonging. Black and brown people screaming at the white officer to stop, stop, please, why. It will be the red mountains that line the golf courses, and the desert beyond them, where one woman feared she’d be left to die. It will be all of these things that make us question what sort of sanctuary we constructed, and for whom.

The women in my family call each other “honey.” My grandmother says “get good at having fun.” They love geraniums. They love pork chops. They love painted red wood and tiny pillows. They loved me and then they were gone.

I have to tell you something. I feel nothing on these pale white days. I slip in and out of consciousness for hours until I approach night. I never recover. I don’t laugh or talk or meet people. I just wonder when it ends and listen to the rain drip in the alley behind my home, where we keep the garbage. I scrub the plates and forget to drink water and slowly, with awareness, decay.

I will remember 24 as the year I took a delicious bath in Colorado. The year I drank pink wine on a roof in Brooklyn and wandered into someone’s tent in Florida to inquire about their homelessness. It will be the year I became strangely into yoga, desperate to smell sage and be touched. The year I tried to learn who I was professionally. Became confused and outraged. Continued depression, but quit therapy. Cut my hair three different ways. Got my first tattoo. Held one, consistent job but interviewed for two. At two $100 meals at the same restaurant in one month while it snowed. Took numerous trips to the same dog park in the East Village for dumb entertainment. Saw the mountains in Canada. Saw the mountains out West. Learned it would always feel this way, like nothing, but I could grow comfortable in that.

Sometimes I find myself missing bitter cold and long drives. The times where I couldn’t stay at home because it was too uncomfortable and found myself absconding to strange basements with dark jaws instead. Those were the golden years I would supposedly cherish, and I’ve forgotten nearly every one. But I remember how it felt to push five miles beyond the speed limit on Lakeshore Drive at midnight with someone else’s cigarette burning my palm.

I could take the night flight to Paris

Wander streets alone and look at things much older than my bones

And the things there will outlast even the largest fears and sticky thighs

I am sure there would be coffee and bread in the morning

An opportunity to cut skin and bleed differently beneath the same moon

on different dirt

But instead I will lay here under plaster and dust

Hopefully getting thinner, but unfortunately older, too

Never having seen a thing but the carcass of my old self

It was thin shoulders that cut the sheets and divided the continent, knowing every tread of your spine and how it matched up the nape of your neck

That’s the one that warmed my hand on the subway platform, made me feel as small and delicate as a tulip petal but, importantly, in a big way

Made me feel pride in the blossom, in your stems

But for all the comparisons to the early morning earth, all the reflections in the mossy dew with all the comfort of encompassing fog, all the mountains and streams and paths

It’s really that you’re an impressive steel structure

Ruthlessly efficient

It’s just that this doesn’t sound romantic

Even when it is

It is all gray exhaustion. You come home and eat half a loaf of bread and drink coffee with milk but you’re still very tired. So tired you could live the rest of your days horizontally. So very tried that you prefer it. The sound of people crossing the streets, running their errands might just feel like a brook in your meadow. The rest of the world would wait. All ambition would retire. And you’d spend a million Sunday afternoons wondering where that time went.

There was this song I’d scream to in 2010, back in the days of greasy pizza and pissing on open curbs and kissing enthusiastically. It was “Oh Lord” by Foxy Shazam. The lyric I resonated with went: “and God knows I’ve had some rough fucking years.” And that was followed by a throaty, bloated, yell: “oh lord, oh lord.” I liked this because presumably, at 15, I thought my worst years were behind me. The most perilous things in my close past seemed to be some light confusion, a father who occasionally slapped me across the face, and a mother who appeared at any moment ready to die. These things hadn’t quite yet disappeared. But they were supplemented by a stripe of freedom that allowed me to pull away each morning in my boyfriend’s Honda CRV while listening to loud music, high on escape.

Then, the song seemed to be one of triumph, of leaving the past behind. I know now that it’s one of acceptance. Things are sometimes foul, and sometimes keep growing fouler, but you persist. Even when that’s not clear triumph, it’s quietly admirable to trudge on. In 2011 I got my own license, my own car. I cut through one humid, delicious summer afternoon alone, and thought all strength was in ones ability to flee. When my mother tried to kill herself twice, and I learned the deep wounds that fleeing can gouge. I rolled from bed to bed, man to man, friend to friend. I engaged in a perilous season of escape, and emerged in New York City at the end of the decade 10 pounds heavier and, presumably, with some rough fucking years ahead. I had grown out of pissing on curbs but still adored greasy pizza and enthusiasm and the same aggravated music I had always needed. But now I failed to flee. I settled into the pain like a neck-high bath, and contemplated another, earlier part of that song. It went: “When the fangs sink in, I’ll stick you but then I’ll throw you back in.”

This warm glove. This on-and-on. This relentless bedroom closing in on my skull, leaving me fractured.

At a certain age you become preoccupied with your face. The times you look at it and realize, what was yesterday won’t ever come again. The sudden urge to walk around the block. Can I convince you to strain the spots out of cold air, make ice? Can I convince you the hot yolk of summer won’t ever fizzle again? Can we please leave our bodies, this once? And float? These are the things I think of while patting lotion into my skin, examining my pores. My angst like a gun pointed toward the mirror, carving out a hollow cheekbone and guaging a scarred face. That spoiled milk.

It occurred to me recently that these will be the years that swirl together and compose a once-lost youth, duly faded. I do not know what my mother did at this age. I do not know what my father did at this age. I know that for the past two years — nearly three now — I’ve come home to a slanted apartment in Queens, the same one where I determined I could be completely comfortable with the sweetly predictable, slender man who makes me laugh. I’ve watched as the tree outside the right bedroom window bloomed, wilted, bloomed, wilted. By my own estimate, I have had more than 1,000 cups of coffee here. I’ve watched this quiet place acquire a bed, a table, a desk. I’ve fought and fucked here. I’ve sobbed. I’ve started antidepressants. I sung numerous times while washing the dishes. I became 23 a few months after moving here, then 24. I will be 25 in two days. That is a quarter of a century. That is a decade from 15, and a decade from 35. It feels tremendously unexciting to be 25, sleeping in a slanted apartment in Queens. But I hardly share a heart with my 15-year-old self anymore.

That part of youth — that teenager, that insanity — melted, too. Swirled together, sticky and sugary and disappointing. When I was 15, I wasn’t not entitled to a future or a personality. I did not know who or what I wanted to become. It may have been the last time I was truly present. I dated a boy named Anthony, and we spent an unusual year together pretending to be adults before we ultimately broke up at the mall during a showing of Iron Man 2. My father, I think, drove us home. 15. I then met a boy named Jake at the local fair. I then held his hand while my friend, Jenna, watched. All those nerves. All that sugar. It was a year where I could still do things, aimlessly, for the first time. Smoked my first cigarette. Snorted pills. Dated a boy who drove a car. Went to the first skatepark. Went to a since-closed diner with burnouts and felt, terribly, like it all ended with this. In the glow of the K-Mart, in the rainy Walmart parking lot, with my chin turned up at a boy I’ve lost touch with since and will likely never speak to again. This existence was not defined by who I wanted to become, but what I was doing at that very moment. And I was always doing the dumbest thing. These years were horrible but touching.

I don’t recall any events that occurred at that time that weren’t directly relevant to my life. There was war, and there was a presidential election, and there was sweet summery boredom. My ignorance was my sanctuary. Now I perch from this room in Queens and stew in what’s happening outside of me, with no real grounding. Maybe this is what happens when youth fades. You cede your individuality to the collective, stop driving, move to New York City. When you lose your year of first kisses, first experiences, 24 becomes the year that the president was impeached, that civil rights were eroded, that the world seemed snarling and cruel. It becomes the year that desperate people piled up on the southern border, asking for reprieve, and were despised for it, if not murdered by the country meant to save them. It became the year that I crawled into a woman’s tent in Florida as she explained to me how she bathed with a hose.

I haven’t had the stomach to write all November, even swaddled in my childhood room. Even with all those recognizable screeches of the floor, of my past, and the lingering comfort of my mother’s perfume. Even by her side with coffee in the morning. Even with Michael, the next day after I got off the plane, made whole again and strangely warm in his presence. Even with all those Saturdays where I just slept and slept and slept. I’m not sure if it’s depression or if I’ve just had the words slurped right out of my brain. But I am a collection of quiet moments right now, zero recollection.

There will be those times in

“Who-am-I” dread

Where it’s all about the taste of bitter coffee, dreams of dropping copper mugs

And the city marathon carrying on below my window

Hello to the woman across the street hanging out her window, hello to me

Hanging out my window, hanging back beside my window

Like we could start talking here, above this dim, and become two people who

Speak above 9 million others

That’d be very amusing, I think, with this coffee and the cheering bouncing about my brain

We wouldn’t be strangers anymore, and it might become so that I am

Not a stranger to anyone

Not even myself

Hooray!

See the rosebud cracking the cement, green with potential and capable of

Well, who knows what!

And squeezed between these buildings it is a universe unto itself and you have to wonder what rotates around this, who circles this stray path, I suppose. And it’s us. Until it isn’t. And it’s nectar. Until it’s rust.

You were a clenched jaw when you came here, sweating all your fears onto the rotting wood that was

Our first apartment. Me too. Me too! I cried and howled at these split walls that buckled me to fast realization that, oh no, I’m no genius. And I pictured myself tangled in pink silk, blossoming into this better woman, when I first realized that the blossoming had occurred, and now I was wilting. My own mother, see, said she was disappearing into her own age. And I realized this started, probably, when she was 22 and too, too old to escape the cries, the howls. Who wants to realize that they’re worse than they thought? That they’ve reached their greatest extension, and that it’s short and polished to its exact, horrifying end?

It’s true that I’ve allowed this idealized version of myself to blossom within, take agency of my mind, run all the rivers. To contort and strain their edges until my push forward is not mine, and this is a woman possessed. Until this poltergeist drinks her spinach and takes fewer afternoon naps.

I don’t know what’s exhausted me so, or why it’s left me so vulnerable to aggravated spirits. I used to write in my high school journal that this — 2011, 2012, 20-whatever — would be the year my chin narrowed to an attractive peak, my skin cleared, I read more books and understood more words. I don’t know if that’s what made my depression such a disease: it’d produce a version of myself that wasn’t attainable to start, or tell me that this version lived within me but couldn’t claw her way to the surface. And by the time I had failed — either to set her free or to start my hero’s journey to become her — I’d be so darkened by the idea that she had ever existed. And that was the idealized version of myself. The one that was drowning. The one that drank her spinach. There have been tiny, confused moments where I thought I was on the right path. I’d crane my neck and realize that I was in this crush of fiery Ohio leaves, cleaved by the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. I’d wake up and study through a Saturday night. I’d read, read, read. My ambition seemed kinetic and I thought I’d surely catch fire. Then I cooled, slipped into that ice bath that is turning 23, then 24, in a city driven by dreams that aren’t your own and, actually, appear exhausting to fathom. The idea of the woman I wanted to be was just the one I had cracked open for that brief while, then lost. I became terribly satisfied just by the ideal of being good, not beautiful. Had I choked her back through frantic sobs on a shitty IKEA couch, stained by my first apartment? Had I leashed her in that first job that did nothing but make me paranoid about my own death? Had I left her in Ohio? Had her confidence been bruised by a summer in Washington, D.C.? Did she slip away in all those afternoon naps?

Midwest

There was the sense that the whole world stretched on for one suburban block, ending in a small park with its concrete expanses and plastic slides and other little girls that shared my name. And my room was dark green. And my light switch was shaped like a corn cob. And there was this sense of yes, of course, this is the way it’s supposed to be. Even in my street name: Oxford. Regal. Carpeted staircases leading to a sloped bed where I’d lay when I was sick. White, cheap fridges with sticky popsicles. A loud screen door that led to a tidy square of grass where I could roll around and stare at the neighbors, wonder about the frightened arguments that blossomed within their own paneled two-story homes. There was no sense that this was all bought, that this was an image we created to stave off everything else we considered to be encroaching upon our drug stores and nuclear families.

This sounds idyllic, I’m sure. And it was, sometimes. This suburbia was also rife with misery. There was a constant, eerie sense that this lifestyle was entirely manufactured and was about to crack. We mowed our lawns and wiped our countertops and paid our mortgages so people assumed we had it together enough not to beat our wives or hit our brothers or call the cops on each other which, of course, we did all the time. My mother and all of her tremendous blonde hair had grown up in this same suburb, choked by its expectations of absolutely nothing and nowhere. Like all of us, she said: I’m leaving. She was raped here, she told me. She wore black leotards and gold jewelry and felt terribly different. She, too, would attend college in the Midwest. She, too, would pretend her existence wasn’t bred in the tilling of land that wasn’t ours, the stillness of the lakes we didn’t create and constantly manipulated. This nice, nice, place. She fled to California, then New York City, then back. She married a man named Steve who came right from the soil, the water. The constant, eerie sense that this lifestyle was manufactured. He beat her, too, like his father beat his mother on the other side of Michigan. He was miserable like his father was miserable. And she was miserable like her parents were miserable. But they had a mortgage, a lifestyle to maintain beneath gray skies and atop sodden grass. So they bought the house near the park, sold the house near the park, bought another house near another park, and tried their very best to pretend their daughter’s fate wasn’t sealed in place. That it wasn’t the same fate of all the other girls who grow up in two-story houses and attend generic, two-story high schools and spend time at the mall, knew boys with guns, knew boys who would be at the pep rally tomorrow with a gatorade bottle full of vodka. Knew boys down on the farm and boys who dreamed of leaving the farm. Knew too many people who are bored and bound to explode and become dangerous. This whole place felt like a narrow sidewalk running along a four-lane highway, just trying to avoid traffic, just trying to pretend it’s not where it is. We were in Michigan. Our lives were stolen. And we were terribly fed up with it all.

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