A year ago, I took a plane from Chicago to North Carolina. I didn’t know I wouldn’t return. I didn’t know what would happen in that city without trains, a city with lush graveyards and creeping vines, where the frats do unspeakable things and the quarry is brilliant at sunset.
I didn’t know that an August job application would mean I’d leave school and end up in Massachusetts in autumn for the first time in five years, dragging my waterlogged clothing and a bottle of rum through the pouring rain.
The entire summer was magical, and it lasted until I debarked from the train the second time, after sunset in early December. I was in California to stay, and I was exhausted.
Summers aren’t meant to last forever.
I’m back in New York. The last time I walked up the street to the bakery was the day of the flood, when the world was enchanted and a cracked mirror was a portal to another world. That evening we drank wine in the torrential rain and ate basil leaves from a watery vegetable garden. The hurricane turned everything sunny and muddy and overfilled and a fish, small and shiny and round, had washed up onto the running path.
Since last summer, I’ve become more sure of in my way of being in the world. I’ve been able to draw out a sketch of my career projects; I’m more ambitious, more prepared. Since the day of the flood, I always carry socks in my backpack.
Over the past week, I’ve had more than one conversation – I don’t think I started them – about cities haunted by exes. Why is it possible, someone asked, that cities can affect you so, even if you’re perfectly fine with the person themselves?
My friend says it is sensory, that a city smells the same summer after summer. If you meet someone, you’ll be doing something; walking around a city, you just sit and reflect on your feelings, for better or worse. I think that’s part of it. Another is that people change, and cities don’t – they have some sort of indelible character. If you meet someone from your past, you’ll talk about how you’ve grown and changed. I have an office in New York now, with so many rooms that you could get lost in it. And even in such a big office, I don’t feel so small. The doctor says I’m 5’5″ in my boots. And you’ve changed too, and making sense of the world continues to be an ongoing dialectic: us, a thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
But come back to a city by yourself, and you’re always the person you were when you first were there, stuck in an endless loop. It can be joyful: New York and San Francisco are full of trains and mists and magic. I wouldn’t like – although this is probably the aesthetic life – to be thrown into a tailspin of sadness by multiple cities; I wouldn’t like to avoid a litany of places because they break my heart.
So when the summer ended, I consolidated my hauntings to a city a thousand miles from the sea, a city, like Delhi, to which I never really got to say goodbye. Sometimes in my dreams, I’m smoking a cigarette after midnight, or taking the train above the fresh-fallen snow, or riding my bike over and over until the sun goes down. I shove my ghosts into ramen shops and pizza parlors. I’ve always been efficient.