This year, for the first time in a long time, it really feels like fall. I was driving with my mom to a bookstore 20 minutes north of us and the leaves along the parkway were so beautiful, I was almost awestruck. I forgot leaves could turn that red—that orange. I forgot that when the sun hits the tree tops they glow like lanterns in broad daylight. On either side of us was the park, miles, and miles of greenspace—enough to make you feel like you were really in it—the entire thing splitting right through the middle of the county and stretched the entire length of the throughway. It ran along the route of a river and at certain points on the trail you could walk right beside it. Like the water, you could flow downstream, slow and steady. Riding past it in the car I wanted to open the door and jump out, the moment looked so beautiful, I wanted to be apart of it too. And funnily, the only part of the county the parkway didn’t seem to touch, within walking distance at least, was mine. From my house, I’d have to be dropped off to the nearest entry point of the woods, unless I was willing to bike through lanes of traffic—the only entry point remotely close to me being closed since I came back home. But no more than mere minutes on the driving on the parkway and you were in it. Outside my window people rode bikes, but most were jogging, pushing strollers, sitting on benches. I was jealous.
Especially considering how your quality of life changes when you have easy access to these things. I realized then how much I valued living next to a park in Boston, then quickly remembered how glad I was not to be in Boston. But when I was I made time for a walk nearly every day. Sometimes it was a short stroll in between classes, others, it was hours spent walking through and beyond the park, listening to music, hoping to expel something. And it was true that since I’d moved back home my desire for an accessible green space had led me to desperations like walking miles of concrete in Midtown, with no aim, after working a nine-hour retail shift in the dead of summer just to stretch my legs—and going to Central Park. A crude drawing of an angel. Here, less than a 5-minute drive or a ten-minute walk away and there you are in a forest with a street down the middle. I couldn’t help but feel a deep injustice. We’re all humans, aren’t we? We have the same needs, all the same biological urges to be surrounded nature every once in a while, to simply see that color green, and let it trigger the dopamine so it can do it’s thing. I started the to wonder the one thing you should never wonder if you’re looking to live a content life of any kind; what makes them better than me? How, in the grand scheme of things, did they end up here and I ended up there?
This past summer my life came crashing down on me. I stood in the middle of it, the walls I’d built, the windows I’d installed, the roof I’d painstakingly tiled all on my own, and watched as it folded in on itself and on to me. Bricks and debris rushed onto me from all angles, heavy, throwing me down as the ground beneath me opened and let me fall into the earth my structure once sat on. Down there, in the sinkhole I was both the cause and the victim of, I had nothing to do but look around and notice. First, I realized that soil I’d tried living on was too soft and much too damp to build a home. My attempt at a foundation was no match for the wetness that lingered below, slowly eating at the core of the place, dampening my pride, my joy, this life I thought I’d made. Then, as I started to claw my way out, I saw the support beams that once stood strong, cracked in half and splayed open on the ground. I touched the shards of wood that splintered at the breaking point, I rubbed my hands over the pieces still intact, smooth and pretty, and I understood that it simply wasn’t strong enough. Maybe once it was, maybe there was a point in time where if I built this exact house in these exact conditions, things would be as I was told they would, as I wanted them too. But this time was not here or now, and instead of the life I was promised I got a huge mess where my home was supposed to be.
All I ever wanted was to be good. To stand on my own and feel breeze past my skin and not shiver with fear. I wanted the ability to look around at my life and feel a warm sense of pride, a sense that I’d done everything as I was told and it had paid off. I can’t remember who it was that first told what a life was and how to live it but they said something like, “a life was a place to live, a job with health insurance benefits, a car you can drive to your job with health insurance benefits, a partner who loves you and only you, a group of friends that you go way back with.” It sounded simple enough. I was told if I went to college and got a degree I would get a job, and friends, and if I was lucky, a partner too. I was told if I worked hard and did as many internships as I could, I would get a good job. I was told that the people you meet at this part of your life are the ones you’re supposed to cherish, to hold close until the very end. I was told that love was enough. I was even once told that I was enough if I did exactly I was supposed to.
Once I’d crawled up from the debris of my house I’d realized that that was all just story. Constructed of lies, bound by hopes, told with conviction. So it wasn’t my fault, the crumbling of this house, but whos was it? Was it my parents? Was it the teachers and advisors who told me, time and time again, that a degree guaranteed a life? Was it the television shows that taught me what love looks like, and how the right relationship might save you from yourself? Who was to blame for my undoing? Someone had to take responsibility because now I was left with all this crap, all this garbage from the house I’d been building that needed to be thrown out, broken down, made invisible. That being the simplest part, the undoing, breaking down each pillar of my belief, peeling it open and poking at the insides, finding them wet and rotten like the soil beneath my house. The hard part is rebuilding. Finding a new plot of land, a new contractor, sourcing the materials, buying them. Worst of all, there’s no such thing as insurance for metaphorical homes. There was no one to pay me out, no one to put a price on what I’d lost.
I didn’t bother looking for the culprit, it seemed like a waste. I had no plan or even idea of what to do next because the plan was that something was going to happen to me. I started to do something like living again. I accepted that there was never a job with health insurance benefits right out of college. I found a job market comparable to the 2008 recession, and a retail job that will make you suicidal during the peak heat of summer (something that’ll force you to drag your body to and fro, the body feeling more like a burden than a vessel, and you’ll give what little you have left of yourself to sell luxury items that cost more than what you make in a shift so that you can earn money). I accepted that there’s no car, and lamented that there’s not even a metro card anymore. I found that instead there’s arguing with NYPD officers after they threaten to write you up for jumping the turnstile. I’d already accepted that there was no apartment, not one in my budget at least. I found myself back in the basement bedroom in my parents house that I’d spent the last four years of my life running from. There is love, but not any of the places they’d told me to look for it. There is hope, as there always is, but when you’re missing something, hope only serves to remind you of it, that something is missing. There is a lack. Nothing feels as it should, nothing you believe holds true anymore. You’re surprised that when you jump and your feet hit the ground it is solid. The world you were promised does not exist.
The town square that the bookshop was in looked like something out of a movie. Little wooden storefronts, cotton webs stretched between window panes, small plastic spiders stuck into them. Light up signs in the front displays and animatronic animals on the sills that dance, flyers for the town Halloween ball stuck to the door. We walked the small walk from the car to the store, admiring all the windows, noticing the spirit, and feeling eyes of people glancing as they walked past us. Right before the bookstore was a laundry mat, and looking for other festivities hung in the window, we saw a “We Stand With Israel” sign. We stopped for a moment. Looked at each other, weighed our options. We should at least give the bookstore a chance, we came all this way—maybe they don’t agree with their neighbors. They had no signs in their windows, nothing indicating that they believed anything. Upon entering everything seemed normal, there was a new releases table at the front and a group of teenage girls were at the checkout. A bulletin board next to the door housed a list of recent prize long lists, the Booker, The O’Henry. I stopped to read them, believing we were safe. Until later my mom, who had walked away while I checked out the lists, found a display in the back of the store with exclusively Israeli revisionist history books and Chelsea Handler’s memoir. We bought nothing and left quickly.
What you choose to believe, that’s the question I should’ve been asking, envious in the car. You are built from the ground up by words, you are a story. One day you woke up and when you blinked sleep out of your eyes everything was clearer than it ever was before. Nothing was fuzzy anymore but as the day went forward you realized someone had already told you who you were, what you were going to do with this thing they called “life,” but didn’t tell you why. It happens to all of us at some point or another, and for a while we’re able to be victims of it. We find places to put the blame when things go wrong, we point fingers, we get angry with the world, we shake our fists to the sky! But remember that waking up is the begining.
It’s the first fall in a long time that feels like fall to me. It might be because, usually, I spend fall clinging to summer, holding onto the last days of warmth because I was about to lose myself. I’ve always been a summer girl. I love the beach, I love the sun. I’d rather sweat than shiver. Summer time brings out a version of myself that can only exist then. I can go anywhere, do anything, I don’t need food or water, the suns rays are enough. Yes, I am a summer girl, always have been and always will be. I bound through June, July, August without a care in the world. I tan easy and I like short-shorts. But this year, when I found the greenest patch of grass in Central Park and I looked up into the brightest yellow sun and it washed over me and stung my skin, and I still felt, in the depths of me that I’d rather be dead. A cool breeze is welcome this year. If the sun can’t fix it, maybe time can.
I’m not usually a fall person but I am this year. I buy apple cider donuts at the grocery store, and I get upset when the temperature goes above 70 degrees. I just recently bought a new purse. A deep purple vintage coach bag I got on Depop for a eighty dollars, and it’s big enough to fit everything I need. I’ve been getting better at shopping lately. I’m finally starting to understand what I want, and how to find it. The decision-making part of my brain is starting to crystalize, I can pinpoint the exact spot that desire comes from in my head. I also bought a trench coat recently, one that has only made me feel more like myself. I stalk around at night with the collar buttoned up to the top, looking over my shoulder like I’m sneaking away from some one. When I leave it open, and it blows in the evening breeze, I feel like the wind is pushing me forward, making me walk faster. Together, my trench coat and my purse and all of the other things I adorn with myself say to the world: Look at me, I’m a young woman who wears a long coat, take me serious now.
The first October morning I stepped out my parents house and there was a breeze in the air. When I looked up to find the leaves glowing golden as the sun rose behind them. When I buttoned my trench coat all the way up and walked to the train station to work a new job (still with no health insurance benefits, but not maddening). When I slung my purse over my shoulder, and it didn’t feel like I was carrying a load, it felt like it was a part of me, a part of my weight that my body already knew how to accommodate and move alongside. When I had no one to call, no one to text, nowhere to run home to, just myself and the day ahead of me. I was happy. Just for that moment, everything stopped, and I was able to look, really look at what I was doing, the life I was living, and I was happy.
In the clearing that my house once was I see vast open space. The grass is starting to grow back over the dirt that filled the sinkhole. In the space my house freed up I’ve found that there’s finally room for my desire. It never fit in the house, too big and always growing, now it sits on the grass, basking in the sun all day long. This past weekend I had the day off work and decided to spend it riding my bike from my house, all the way to and up the park next to the parkway. The whole trip was about seven miles, I rode through neighborhoods I didn’t belong to, past houses of people who got what they were promised, and into the woods with a history longer than this county and the people who live in it. I sat on benches and watched the water flowing over the rocks in the river and the sun shone, and I was happy to see it again. I could watch as it made the trees around me swell with light and that was enough, I didn’t need it to keep my body warm.
Even if just for a moment. Because what else do we have but a series of them, moments, following one another in a chain until it tells a story of a life. That’s what they had told me—stories. Not any good ones, not ones rooted in any kind of desire or wanting, ones that had been told to them, by their own nameless faceless figure, their own systems shepherding them towards a reality rooted in security, sureness, and the kind of false happiness that lasts more than a moment. I don’t quite know what I want yet but I’m getting closer and closer every day. As I follow each impulse without question, as I make hard choices, as I plant new seeds, I’m moving closer to a version of myself who knows exactly what house to build, where, how, and with whom. For now, though, I’ll keep wearing my coat and finding other sacred things to keep me warm.
