Impulse and Recovery

Yes, the promised pictures are coming.

Yes, there will be fragments of New York City in them, snapshots of the little of it I saw. The busy-ness. The buildings. The quiet moments spent alone in my cousin's apartment with a cup of black tea and white noise for inarticulate company.

But right now I'm still thinking.

While I was in Brooklyn Sarah and I spoke of jobs and career opportunities, of modeling gigs, of money-making and the fact that femininity is so easily employed as a tool to open any door desired. "Basically, if you're a girl in New York you can get just about anything you want. There aren't any limits." And she's right. Play the field correctly, develop a thick skin and an easy demeanour, and there's not a whole lot that a girl can't obtain.

To be honest, New York tempts me. The anonymity and vastness of the city is seductive, as is the thought of being entirely dependent upon my own ingenuity and work ethic in a place where no one actually cares whether I live or die, and I find myself drawn to the idea of relocation. Even as I remind myself that, no, it would not be a good idea, the thought remains present in the forefront of my mind, and I can't quite shake the notion of packing a bag and running off to the city. Because I do like to run, especially when unsure of myself. In a way it is far easier than dealing with myself in the silence of a life with spaces for growing.

Did I say spaces for growing? At this point I'm not certain that I'm doing anything more than aimlessly drifting and indulging in painfully useless loneliness.

I don't like this kind of growing, the sort that involves relinquishing what sense of self can be extracted from surroundings and replacing it with something that relies upon a state of being instead of a checklist of things done. It is awkward. It is uncomfortable. I don't quite know what to do with it.

I don't know what to do with being alive, really, and that's a strange place to stand. Strange because I've never had to fight so hard to stay on track. To breathe. Because before I was panicking but now I'm so empty that it seems a breath drawn would lodge irretrievably between the sides of my collapsing body and quietly suffocate. Before I was panicking but now I'm finding out the cost of that panic, and the price is higher than I knew.

Last night I sat on the floor of the laundry room at three in the morning with a notebook beside me and no words, knees drawn up to my chin, flinching every time I caught a glimpse of my face in the door of washer, squinting against the glare of the overhead light. I don't have this mess of a life sorted, at all. Not unexpectedly, that makes me want to run. Back to the city, back to the west coast, back to anywhere but here, forward to anywhere but here—and this is the only place to which I've ever wanted so much to return.

Yes, I could move. Go to Brooklyn. Go to Philadelphia. Go to Seattle. Go anywhere at all. Get lost in a city. Make money. Learn to use people, learn to use myself, learn to survive and jostle and make my way through a life with no silence and no spaces and no people who care. With no standard to which to be tacitly held. It would be so easy to lose every shred of self-respect and simplistic appreciation of life in a place where materialistic accomplishment is the pinnacle of achievement and a girl's body is her greatest asset, since self-loathing has already all but paralysed me here anyway. Every day serves to remind me how seamless a transition it would be, and every night drives the point home.

Silent spaces are unavoidable here.

I want to learn to live with them. Learn to live in them. Instead of bolting for the nearest crowd in which to hide, I want to stay.

Accomplishment can wait. The seduction of the city and its promise of anonymity is a temporal solution to panic, the sedation of a mind driven half-mad by itself, but where would the resolution be in that? A career in mindlessness may delay the inevitable, but in the end there is no getting away from the fact that a reckoning point will always arise where it becomes necessary to face the person I am and the form life has taken and accept that and then move on to other things.

Like taking opportunity of the quiet here to get over myself and learn how to live a truly balanced and productive life. 

Like breathing.

New York City has too much smog.