It is nearly 11 am in East Village, and a woman in a flowing purple dress stops, turns, and walks five metres back to check her reflection in a mirror fragment on the ground. When the wind shifts, it smells like Delhi.
A woman in an orange shirt walks in front of me, blasting music from her bag. The humidity weighs heavy in the air.
Two days ago, I was driving from Western Massachusetts with a friend I had not seen in a very long time. I said, my music taste is varied; but often I just listen to the same song over and over again, only that, for a long time. He said, yes, I do that too, and you know, you do it for two weeks and it’s like your life has a soundtrack, and when you hear that song again you’re transported back to that time. I wonder, I said in delight, is this something people besides us do? I don’t know.
Anyway, I spent my first day of summer at a mall in Durham, North Carolina. It was hot and humid and when I got off the plane I’d gotten an exciting email and so I’d taken the 140-page printout of my book and moved between the too-hot outside and the too-cool inside, marking up pages and pages with a pen. The trees of central North Carolina are covered in creeping vines, and the baked goods are the most wonderful I have tasted.
The buildings here are covered in fire escapes, and the sidewalk in front of every shop smells like a different city in the world. I get off the main street a block early, frown, look at my phone, and turn back.
In late June on the train from Wilson, North Carolina, to Washington, D.C., the conductor said the train would fill past Richmond, and a man asked me if I was going to D.C. and sat next to me even though there were still spots on the train. Throughout the ride, he began to bring things out of his briefcase and count: laminated basketball cards, silver coins, stacks of money. He gave each of the small children in the car old basketball cards, Michael Jordan, limited edition, he told them, these are worth a lot of money, they’ll be worth a lot of money someday. Tell the man thank you, the parents said.
I enter the bakery I’ve been looking for. You again, the baker laughs, we made some almond croissants after you left yesterday. Me again, I loved them so much yesterday I came back to buy some for my friends – my friend from Paris recommended this place, said it was as good as home. Everyone here is French, he says, except me. I was born and raised in Brooklyn; I’m hiding the accent. I’m from Boston, I say. You understand.
A year after my mother was born, my grandparents moved to a house near an elementary school in Hawaii. Their grass is still the best in the neighborhood, a faded beware of dog sign in the gate, and mango and Meyer lemon trees pruned in the back – what in my childhood was a tangled jungle, tamed. I spent July sitting in that house and learning about the past, spending the mornings and evenings walking and running around the block. The neighbours would sometimes ask where grandma was, well, she’s quilting – does quilting replace walking? – they’d laugh – she’s 26 years old even though she looks younger, she would say. And I’d learn about the fruits in their backyard, their work, familial cycles of life.
Anyway, my grandfather would cook us delicious food every night; as a teenager, he worked making and delivering noodles, and he told me about how computers used to be so large and only do one thing, and he had been there for their whole development and now – he pointed to my phone, recording – now this tiny thing was so much more powerful than all the computers he’d worked on. My grandmother told me stories of when she was young and traveled the world.
For half of July, I went to the beach every morning, man-o-wars dotting the shore; the mountains in the background. I put my sweatshirt on in the evenings and read a book; between a blue and red cover, it somehow contained the world.
When I walk around cities, I find myself narrativising my life. Perhaps it’s unhealthy, I think, as I get off the train and walk towards Penn Station, an excited family in front of me. But, I think, other people my age take photos everywhere; they use social media to give day-to-day updates. I just use writing as a medium, not any stranger, not any worse nor better.
Three weeks ago, I was in Tacoma, Washington. Outside of where we were staying, there was a mural of characters in Alice in Wonderland and a climbing wall and above, through the cracks between the buildings, you could see Mount Rainier. It looked like the home of the gods, as impressive as a glacier being uncovered from the fog.
I am on the train now. I wanted to spend the summer taking trains all across the USA. I’ve been taking photos at most every station; I’ve been taking videos of the landscapes remarkable and not. I’m not sure when, or if, I’ll share them. It is a clean train, all blue and white, and the clouds outside are ripe with rain.
Some days ago, we were sitting on a pier at a beach just north of the city, the waves cutting crescents that sometimes splashed our feet. The weather was perfect.
Two nights ago, I read a novella about writing and memory. It was about, partially, how writing can help you clarify and eloquentise your thoughts, but you lose something moving from an oral to a written storytelling culture. The point of a story isn’t in the exact wording, or sometimes, even, in the truth of what happened – if two people, for example, remember meeting in a certain way, there would be no point to having some objective verification of the meeting. The mutual remembering becomes truer than what a retinal memory scan would’ve told you.
Anyway, I was telling a story about college at a wedding afterparty last week. My friend said, Siobhan, there are stories that are yours to tell and stories that are not. He was right; he usually is about such things. He then proceeded to tell his story. Some stories are mine to tell, and some are not, but most stories are only partially mine, because we do not live life isolated, and that is a gift.
Stories, more than anything, help me make sense of the world.
I love life, I said. In what is mine to tell –
I ran out into the Chicago night.