Hope Street

Hi there.

I know it's been a long time since anyone saw me around here, as I've moved my blog over to Lilit in Stereo. But, since not all of you have migrated over to the new page, I wanted to make sure you all know about my new project.

Introducing Save The Assistants, where all beleaguered low-on-the-totem-pole office slaves can have their voices heard. We post your stories about nightmare bosses, crazy assignments, and office politics- anonymously, of course. We also post office doodles, comics, and other workplace-inspired art. Take a peek and contact me with any questions.

And stop by my own site sometime too. Don't be strangers, you hear?

I am twenty three and one half years old today. I suppose that's as fitting an occasion as any to say that I am leaving my happy home at Livejournal to go out into the big, scary world of the interweb.

You'll be able to find me- and links to my writing- at www.lilitinstereo.com, built courtesy of Michael.  Come on over once in a while, have some tea, leave a comment.  I'll be keeping this account active so that I can still read all of your lovely words.

I must remember to be thankful.  I must constantly remember that there is nothing I love more than Brooklyn on a warm day, people out on the streets, walking their dogs, carrying their groceries, and stopping to say hello.  The first day in five months I walked out of my house without a coat.   A party in a house with a recording studio in it.  I'm over my sniffles but everyone else is getting sick.  A whole day with Ashley and Pico The Pug, walking on the cobblestone side streets in the West Village and admiring silk dresses in the windows.  I am one winter ahead of her.  She is miles wiser.

I must remember to be thankful, in my little room wearing new jeans and snuggling up with an old friend.  I must remember to be thankful, because my new boss gave me flowers, because I've only been at the company three weeks and I've already published two pieces on the site.  A year and a half ago I would never have fathomed familiar people in the crush of Union Square or a former lover sleeping in my bed without me.  I know the names of the buildings now.  I know east and west and the best bakery in the neighborhood.  

David accused me once of writing images and not scenes.  Here is a scene for you.  Setting: Hope Street, also lovingly known as "Desolation Row."  It's drizzling outside.  The redheaded girl makes a cup of tea and gets up the nerve to call that guy she likes.  He answers.  They make plans to get together that week.  She writes for a little while, things for this book she can't stop talking about.  iTunes is set on "random" and keeps playing songs about New York City.  An old friend calls and they promise, again, that this will be the year they get around to visiting each other.  Later when her eyes begin to blur from too much time at the screen she sweeps the floor and scrubs the sink in the bathroom.  For the first time in a long time, she is alone in her busy house.  Someone bought the Times and left it on the living room table.  There have been no epic poems today, nothing dramatic or enviable.  She thinks I must remember to be thankful as she washes her hands.  It is still drizzling outside.  She thinks that she might like another cup of tea. 

I went to Amoeba Music in Berkeley with zipperblues and bought a CSNY record.  In my father's rental car I played "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" over and over again while he pretended not to notice me moving my lips along to the music.  Rebecca took me to hillel, but all I could think about during the amidah was how strange it felt to be home and not-home, how I was writing the book the whole time my father and I were together but couldn't tell him.  On the beach I was able to read Dubus' Dancing After Hours, but I brought it to San Francisco because I hadn't retained a  word, recalling only the ethereal feelings they gave me.  I wanted to meditate but couldn't get any silence in my head.  mirth4maudlin and surrealpenguin are perhaps the two loveliest, in-loveliest hosts I've ever had.  

He wanted to talk about northern California, since he might trade this city for that one.  He is tired of paper and maybe of the trains.  We went to Essex House and  sat for a long time watching people fight for cabs on Rivington Street, thankful we could walk home in a quick minute.  This winter has been a coy one.  Two giant snowfalls and the next day forty-three degrees.  Now it's just below freezing along the seven blocks to the J train, wind always finding the exact path I am taking.  Erin and Tadd are both coming for separate weekends in March.  I want to go to museums and the park and fancy restaurants and pretend I haven't been living here all this time. 


Brennan says that adulthood is lonely.  Depending on the day, I think she's right.  Sometimes it's mango grappa, free tickets, and new friends on a private beach; sometimes it's the telephone silent for hours and hours.  I always know what's louder.  I always know what lingers.

I promised myself that if I got the job I'd go lie on a beach somewhere for a couple of days, so I'm in the Bahamas, and when I am done it's off to San Francisco and then back home to start my new gig as an editorial assistant at Beliefnet.com.

The man who runs the only used bookstore on New Providence Island wouldn't sell me Donna Tartt's The Secret History for anything more than a dollar, even though the cover price was three, and gave me some pear juice to drink on my way. I'm staying in a pink hotel and can't walk up the front steps without humming that line from "Big Yellow Taxi." There are also boutiques and some swinging hot spots. I'm just off of Bay Street, the main tourist road, and among the duty-free and souvenir shops, there's an organic market where the owner showed me how to find the best eye of the coconut to drill into for milk.

All I have done is write and read and eat plantains and jerk chicken. Every building I went into yesterday had Coretta Scott King's funeral on television. A man who gave me a tour of the parliament house has managed to find me a rare fifteen-cent piece to give to Dad for his coin collection.

I measure time in water, and the Caribbean is turquoise around my ankles. The locals think the water is cold this time of year, and when it gets below 70 at night they put on sweaters and caps. The first thing I did when I got in was put my winter coat in the closet, close the door, and forget the thing ever existed. I think it is snowing at home.

Every place is supposed to remind you of some other place, but this one is difficult to categorize. The beachfront houses and hotels are lavender and coral and seafoam green, like New Orleans or Savannah. The cars are on the other side of the road and little children wear uniforms to school, just like in England. The verandas and open-air churches remind me of Spain. But this place is not any of those places. I imagine that there must be sad people here, just like there are sad people in other warm and lovely places. Everyone I meet thinks it is odd to go to paradise alone, but I cannot be sad, because there is a palm tree outside my window and white sand to sit on and a book to write.

Living in the same place for a year has made me antsy.  It's harder to move in Brooklyn than it is in Greensboro, where applications are intense processes and everyone wants first-month-last-month-deposit-down.  I love my house on Hope Street, I love my sapphire-colored comforter and days in the immediate shadow of the bridge, but the rest of my life is tensed in anticipation of the next home.

So instead I quit my job without having a new one and bought a pair of boots I needed but could have waited for.  He took me out for tapas and champagne at a fancy restaurant on Ludlow Street where we didn't even have to wait for a table but by the time we were back home I'd spoiled it all.  You can cuddle on a red banquette and still sleep alone. 

Dating men a decade older than you will make you forget that you have actually matured in these fifteen or so months in a new city.  Instead of a retaliatory kiss I called to say I was sorry.  Instead of running away to Nassau I went on three interviews (although I might end up there after all).  Instead of consoling myself with solitary meals, I went with girlfriends to Indochine for restaurant week and had dreams all night about Fuji apple sorbet on a round green plate.

There were two engagements this week, both beautifully matched and perfectly timed.  Other people are quite good at love, even if I'm still playing at it.  One wedding will keep me right in my borough and the other will take me to eretz Israel, if I can make it.  In the meantime, my last day at my job is Friday, and then some time to write and interview my heart out before I get to San Francisco.  Maybe time in another city will cure this itch of mine a bit.  Or maybe when I come home I'll start wandering again.

I have homes on the mind, as usual.  Raleigh and I have reconciled.  I have often seen that city as incidental to my growing up, as in, all the events could have been set in anyplace in the world without regard to scenery.  Half the time I imagined myself on the Oklahoma plain I knew only from a car window, eight hours of flatness.  No one believes that I grew up in a small town.  This last visit, it was a real, distinct individual with its own places and residences.  Raleigh things.  It helped that almost all of my favorite people were there- Eileen and Morgan, Melanie and Rick, Valerie, Erin, Tadd, Carol, Emily, Jason.  I marveled and forgot two-dollar beers.  My sister and I went to a movie on Christmas Day.  Trying to fit a lifetime in a week will help things to fly faster.  Amy announced her engagement to me in the passenger seat of someone else's car.  Lindsay and Derek are going to try for kids this year.  I was ready for the city and the city was ready for me, even as I stifled every urge to label it a town, a village, a spot on the map. 

By the time I got home to Brooklyn, I felt as if I'd lived out the year properly.  Despite its name, Hope Street is not a very beautiful place.  My little house is the only liveable dwelling on the block.  Its neighbors are the back end of an unused factory and a wall that gets re-graffitied every few months.  Peter calls it "Hopeless Street," thinking he is hilarious.  I prefer a Dylanesque slant, referring to it as "Desolation Row."  But it is my Hope Street.  Raleigh was a borrowed place for me during the last week of December, and that was the most valued it has ever been to me.  Williamsburg was warm and happy to see me, Chanukah candles in place.  I read Please Don't Come Back from the Moon, which I characterized to Kathryn as "an urban fairy tale," on the train and almost missed Metropolitan Avenue. 

The nicest gift of the New Year so far was him saying I love your writing, even better than loving me, noting my 'delicate touch.'  I don't think I've ever touched love or words delicately, but there was a truth to him and I wanted hard to believe it.  I am proud of you, I said in response, and meant it.  We were in my little room on Hope Street, on the uncomfortable blankets and pillow I am in the process of replacing and the bed he hates that I have no intention of getting rid of.  This bed was the first thing besides an apartment that I acquired in New York, after trudging all the way from the bus station with my two suitcases.  I've accumulated a lot since then: clothes and shoes, books, a dresser from the Salvation Army, a slew of odd jobs and an even one.  He is my newest acquisition, but I don't like terms of ownership.  He'd come to see me through my head cold, tea in his coat pocket, although I don't like potential romantic interests to see me in my pajamas.  I think I know well enough by now that I shouldn't write about men in my livejournal, even nice ones, even ones who visit me when I am sick, but then, I've never been delicate with words.

I tried to do that 2005-in-review meme, but couldn't get past the first question. 

What did you do in 2005 that you had never done before?

Was a bridesmaid in a wedding.  Cried at said wedding. Downloaded iTunes.  Went out with a man thirteen years my senior.  Took Hebrew classes.  Stayed up all night on the swings in McCarren Park.  Learned to cook tofu.   Saw live music at South Street Seaport and Madison Square Park.  Took the PATH train.  Lived to tell about it.  Became a Contributing Editor.  Taught the SATs to immigrant children in Bed-Stuy.  Supported my neighborhood kickball team.  Went to the beach in Long Island.  Tried coke.  Referred to 40-degree weather as "not that cold."  Got into major credit card debt.  Paid it all off. Became a member of the Bushwick Country Club. Wore corporate casual.  Found out exactly what corporate casual was.  Waited an hour for a table at a restaurant.  Took the Roosevelt Island tram.  Hung out on a music video shoot.  Got mentioned on Gawker because of said music video.  Visited New Orleans.  Had a December picnic.  Lived in the same apartment for an entire year (as of 1/15/06, but I'll take it). Ordered takeout at a bar.  Bought designer jeans. Explored the Cloisters.  Made the first move.  Got an eyebrow wax.  Sold a freelance piece.  Went to the Met hungover.  Didn't miss Greensboro.  Celebrated Purim and Simchat Torah.  Walked in two and a half feet of snow.  Had a VIP pass for a sold-out show.  Saw a naked homeless man on my front steps.  Ignored him.  Took a gypsy cab.  Got a fucking agent.

( and also, books I loved )

"Manna falls from the sky; I have only to open my hands and receive."- Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

Kathryn and I got the last two seats on the Thursday morning bus to Atlantic City.  With our bus tickets we got coupons for $20 in chips at the casino.  I spent the first twenty minutes of the ride trying to figure out what to call the neighborhood around Port Authority (isn't it too far north to be Chelsea? It it too south to be Hell's Kitchen?).  When we pulled into the casino two and a half hours later, we immediately cashed in the chips and marveled at spending ten dollars on a round trip ticket.  I've never been allured by casinos, by the farmland of glittering machines and the bells that ring above a lucky person's head.  The carpets and the walls and even the pretty girls who come by with trays of beer and soda seem as if they've been smoking for thirty years.

May's Landing, New Jersey, is a half hour drive from Atlantic City, smaller than North Raleigh, smaller than Greensboro.  Their middle school is called High Point.  The matching houses in the subdivisions are the same as the one I grew up in.  Shopping centers and gas stations and churches.   It might as well have been my parents' neighborhood, with oaks in place of dogwoods, fifteen degrees cooler thanks to the winds coming in from the Jersey shore.  (Am I becoming someone who thinks every place but New York looks the same?)  It was the second Thanksgiving I'd ever not spent with my family, and just as their street stood in for ours her father and mother stood in for mine, the same old stories and cookie cutters and hatred of the city.  We had tea and watched television and I remembered what it's like to have someone else cook for you and make your bed. 

It's too cold to walk but I want to go up to India Street, Java Street, and travel by collecting names.  I want to curl up on my favorite stone bench in the community garden in McCarren Park, where I used to kiss David back when I still thought I might love him, even though the primroses are long gone and the ferns are resting until spring.  The new organic market up the street is still selling plums, but they're the last of the stock, bruised and a little sour.  This year I am better off than last year.  I have a solid coat and am proficient at layering.  I know the bus routes to Greenpoint and the warm part of the JMZ train platform.  But I'm a Southernish girl, and I still shiver sometimes.

There is always a new city for me, and every time it contracts it expands.  Celebratory champagne at the Temple Bar because I have an agent.  Holding my gloveless hands in his outside a restaurant on Second Street.  Downstairs one of my housemates is playing an electric piano.  Hanukkah is coming, a long weekend in Maine, and Raleigh again.  The first time back since this time last year.  Winter, again.  I wait and hope for snow.

I cried over pictures of home and an alumni magazine in the mail. More people from my graduating class are getting married or having children. My city, my Greensboro, taking root and building a new museum, new restaurants, even a hookah bar. Val and Kevin are moving in together. Nate lives on Hill Street, just across the cemetery from my old place, but I cannot walk across the gnarled trees and ancient stones to see him. That was the cemetery where he, James, and I watched the fireworks and decided what we wanted to be independent from. I said "geography."

Before there was Greensboro, before there was Spain, before there was New York, there was a girl who sat in a room and wrote in spiral bound notebooks. An agent read my manuscript and we talked about it today. "You are a good writer," he said. He liked the scene with the boy on the roof and the part about my father's accident. He says I have excellent technique. The part about Elisabeth Zinser made him cry.

[Elizabeth Zinser was a hearing woman who, in 1988, was chosen to be the President of Gallaudet University, the all-deaf school where my parents met. The students protested her selection and started the "Deaf President Now" movement, the Selma of the Deaf Rights movement. Zinser resigned and went away, leaving her position open for a deaf candidate. Zinser had been hired by Gallaudet away from UNCG. For awhile I was obsessed with finding her. I met people who had worked with her, gathered recollections and anecdotes. I scoured the internet and traced her post-Gallaudet career. I was obsessed with her because she was a shadow for me, hearing in a deaf world, knowing that no matter how she worked she'd never belong there. Knowing that she was always an impostor. A usurper. Writing a narrative that was not hers.]

I thought that section was the poorest of the whole book. The agent read about my father, my first love, the first time I understood death. But Elizabeth Zinser made him cry. Like how I can sort through old photographs and diaries long since abandoned, but it is news of a new train station in Greensboro that makes me cry.

I want every day to be like yesterday; the perfect New York day.

Parents are in town. Had omelets-and-mimosas brunch at Nolita House, then spent all afternoon at the mammoth Russia! exhibit at the Guggenheim. A whole roomful of Kandinskys, the ones with bubbles and pastel colors. Cool, crisp autumn weather. I wore a sweater and blazer. After dropping them off, I walked around the village, up to the peanut butter store on Sullivan Street (I always end up humming the Counting Crows song "Sullivan Street") and then curling up Broadway to my favorite church on the corner of East Tenth. The woman I bought the perfect-sought-after bronze earrings from gave me a discount and I passed by Lauren Ambrose, she of the Perfect Hair Color, walking nonchalantly southward.

Home. They were filming a Matisyahu video in front of my house. I met him very briefly, said I was a fan and that I'd been to his free show in Washington Square Park (see www.jewschool.com or Esther's site, www.estherkustanowitz.typepad.com, for photos). Hope Street is going to be famous now, and I'll never look at my unruly block the same way. Wore my new earrings on one of the hall-of-fame great first dates. Spanish rioja, mussels, and fennel salad in a candlelit place under the JMZ that rattled when the train went past. He drove me home in his silver Mini Cooper. I put on Miles of Aisles, the first CD I ever listened to in my old place on Magnolia Street, and danced and danced and danced.

You are not supposed to write on the Sabbath or on other holy days, this one being the holiest of all. Like energy, nothing should be created or destroyed, which is why we should not light fires, rip paper, or play musical instruments. But I came home from shul last night (a nice hippie one, where there were instruments and candles) and curled up in the armchair and wrote. It has been raining incessantly. I have a cold. Even though I am fasting I am drinking tea.

In the morning service for Yom Kippur, as well as the one for Rosh Hashanah, there is a long passage from the Book of Leviticus about the way that you should treat other people, and one line always echoes for me: "You shall not insult the deaf, nor put stumbling blocks before the blind." I came home and wrote and reread Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and remembered that when I'm not working all the time and trying to fit friends into scheduling crevices, I am a writer.

During the Amidah you are encouraged to do personal prayer, to meditate on the things you hope to change and accomplish during the coming year. I thought of a book and the agent who is reading it, but also of other books not written yet, and other poems, and other cities and other countries in which to write them. I said a Kaddish for a friend's brother, a man I never knew, a man who wasn't a Jew. There was a comfort in it, because I was lucky enough in the year not to lose anyone close to me (I never got to meet Sontag, or Derrida). But someone I love lost someone she loved, and in some sort of cosmic transitive property it was the same as my very own loss.

I swear I feel older.  The night was flawless: white wine straight from the bottle, singing on the roof, "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" on the stereo.  There was no one to kiss at midnight, but I slept warm and solitary.   Brunch, the Met, Cafe Gitane, mustard-colored leather, friends in from out of town, Romanian Poems by Paul Celan.  The first day of the year that really felt like autumn.  I wrote a sketch about my father learning how to ballroom dance.

There are stars in Brooklyn, Virgo fading from sight as Libra ascends.  The best lesson I ever learned about balance: "it doesn't mean you're always on an even keel.  It means that the passion and insanity and everything else come in equal amounts."  Mira thinks I walk like a New Yorker, clipped and precise, but today there was nothing but bricks and trees and a breeze coming in over the river.  I walked like I was in Greensboro again.   One of my gifts was a knife.  I saw the place where the key used to be.

I swear I feel older.  I have goals and ways to accomplish them.  Sometimes my soul kicks.  I haven't been to Japan yet, or Tahiti, or Portugal. Always another day to live through.  I walked through Matisse's room full of carpets and tapestries with their tiny prints.  I think it's going to be a good year.  There are stars in Brooklyn.  I wished on one.

 

 

I am taking a Hebrew class.  Actors talk about having to learn to speak and walk all over again in their training, and I am learning to read all over again.  It isn't like learning French or Spanish, where the letters are familiar and their order doesn't mean anything.  I'm learning new letters, new shapes, what it means when there are dots or slashes, to go from right to left.  Recognizing a particular combination of symbols is a victory- abba! that means 'father'! Wait, I think that says 'Aviv'!-  I haven't learned the names of the letters or the proper order they go in; this teacher thinks that we should learn pronunciation before anything else.  It's a crash course designed for bar mitzvah kids or adults who haven't been to shul in years.

Nicole said admiringly (and perhaps unfairly), "you do everything."  With work being as consuming of my life as it is, I have to find other ways to fill up my time.  Jake and I went to a Harold Bloom reading.  He talked about the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Leaves of Grass and in his chestnut voice it was written anew.  It was his seventy-fifth birthday and everyone in the audience was given confetti to throw at the end of his lecture.  I donated a box of books to a charity that is giving them to people at shelters in Louisiana and Texas.  I went to John's new place in Long Island City.  I drank champagne in a bar shaped like a tunnel.  It's hard to have a designated place to be for a significant portion of each day.  I force myself to go out to dinner or to a party, only to be so glad that I went.  I'm relearning how to sleep.  As autumn looms I keep feeling like New York is going to filter through me if I don't love it closely enough.  For the first time, I not only understand why some writers have studios but want one myself, a place to go that isn't a bedroom or a study or anything else in the world but a place for me and my words.    I want a little room with windows and plants and a desk and enough pens so I never run out.  I am going to paint my bedroom yellow just in time for the cold.  I must remember why I have chosen to live here over every other place in the world. 

Next Saturday is my birthday. 22 has been strained but hopeful.  I am eager to see what 23 will make of me.

 

September 24, 2004 (my 22nd birthday): "I found Greensboro in Brooklyn yesterday. I was wandering Williamsburg, the closest B'klyn neighborhood to Manhattan, after my yoga class there. It is very much like downtown Greensboro, with dirty industrial buildings slowly being renovated into hole-in-the-wall diners and indier-than-thou record shops. I found a coffee shop with my favorite tea from the Green Bean. Then, turning a side street in search of a thrift shop, there it was: water, and the downtown skyline. It literally took my breath away. That is why I came here."

November 10, 2004: "I don't know if I wanted this. I didn't expect everything to be handed to me and to work out perfectly, but I didn't want to be poor and frustrated either."

November 28, 2004: "Until this point, I moved effortlessly between places, but now I have trouble discarding them. If there was a Tate Street Coffee in the middle of Chelsea or Park Slope, magically transported, I think I'd never leave."

January 16, 2005: "Manhattan is a story weary of being told, an old woman who just wants to go to sleep. Brooklyn’s amorphous neighborhoods are poems waiting to happen. Brooklyn Heights. Cobble Hill. Park Slope. Carroll Gardens."

March 5, 2005: "And if it was love I really wanted, I'd be fine, because love is Brooklyn and I have it. Every night I sit on my steps and say goodnight to the Empire State building, seeing what mood she is in. Whenever it snows, the lights are the brightest white I have ever known."

March 18, 2005: "Where am I going? Why Brooklyn, why poverty, why writing and love affairs and a job at a magazine?"

June 6, 2005: "While wearing a pencil skirt and chignon, I run into an acquaintance from college on the J train. 'You look so much older,' she says. 'New York is a good look for you.' "

June 27, 2005: "Somehow my Greensboro reputation is inching its way here: I get called to consult and recommend places, getting credit for introducing the Manhattanites to Bembe and Zebulon and any number of thrift shops."

July 11, 2005: "I promised myself that the day New York City stopped being revelatory and beautiful to me, I would leave. That day hasn't come yet, and I'm still here."

August 31, 2005: I moved here a year ago. I spent the whole first night crying in a room I hated, convinced I was setting myself up for failure. Tomorrow Kathryn and I are taking the Roosevelt Island tram. I have a postwork drinks date with Doree. A year ago, I arrived in the midst of the Republican National Convention and spent my first day as an intern navigating the streets of Chelsea trying to find a post office. A year ago, I carried a subway map everywhere and got lost constantly. I even once referred to the 1/2/3 (and the dearly departed 9) train as the "red line." Everything I can say about my life now sounds like a cliche, or like boasting. Let's just say that now I know exactly where in Chelsea to take my mail. And that I don't hate my room.

Looking forward to Year Two. And maybe more.

I am such a fucking sap, I really am.  For all my personal fear of marriage and inability to have a functional relationship, I thought that Kimba and Mike's wedding was the loveliest thing I'd ever seen.  She almost didn't ask me to be a bridesmaid because she thought it went against my beliefs.  "I don't oppose marriage," I told her, "for other people." 

http://www.photoreflect.com/scripts/prsm.dll?eventorder?photo=0BUV000H020061&start=0&album=0&adjust=-1

 

I managed to extract my dress from the David's Bridal in Queens, after a series of screwups, the day before I left.  I took the Chinatown bus down to DC, read The English Patient (most.beautiful.book.ever), and arrived almost in time for my first pedicure. 

http://www.photoreflect.com/scripts/prsm.dll?eventorder?photo=0BUV000H060025&start=0&album=0&adjust=-1&d=0&pphoto=0BUV000H060024

It was a big, sappy, conventional ceremony, and I loved every damn minute of it. 

http://www.photoreflect.com/scripts/prsm.dll?eventorder?photo=0BUV000H010091&start=0&album=0&adjust=-1&d=0&nphoto=0BUV000H010092

Of course, I spent the whole weekend being thinking about scary things like commitment and family and how even though we're only a year out of school my friends are becoming all kinds of amazing things. Zipporah and Ryan just bought an apartment together.  Marcelita is in California.  I can't wait to see what's next.

 

I spent a long time today at work reading the galley proofs of a book we're putting out called A Day in the Life of the American Woman. It's a photography collection of women from all over the country partaking in their daily activities: taking care of a sick relative, working on their farm, lighting Shabbes candles, and the like. There are a lot of cancer survivors and women who start their own nonprofit or charitable organizations.

I wrote to Michael once that there is a time of growth and a time of pruning back. Plants can't bloom all the time. You cut your hair to make it grow back faster. Right now I wish I was going on a long vacation or writing for three days straight, but I have to think of my time differently. At work I take on extra manuscripts to read over at night or on the train. I cultivate work relationships and keep up with industry publications. This is the training period, the rehearsal, the research. I almost force myself to write on weekends, rather than sleep more or rummage around for a sample sale. Right now I am not deserving of inclusion A Day in the Life..., but I hope that someday I will be. After all, the surgeon had to go to medical school, and the entrepreneur spent years working at a company where she learned a trade. It has to be my time sometime.

I took a class sophomore year that we nicknamed "How To Sound Good at Cocktail Parties," because the professor was obsessed with us learning one or two lines from every poem we read that would make a good pithy toss-out at a party or dinner someday. I don't want to accumulate a lifetime's worth of pity toss-outs. I don't want to work like the doomed brides in the story of Hades: carrying buckets full of holes to fill bathtubs full of holes. Although I won't get the winter beach this year, last night I charted new parts of Murray Hill, found a new favorite jewelry shop and saw the Empire State Building from ground level. In the meantime, my life has not halted. This weekend there's a going-away party, a barbecue, a dinner, new books from work, and additions to a chapter. The trick is that stillness has its own rhythm, that even in what seems to be stagnation there is a quieter, subtler growth. No one sees the growth as it happens, they only see the result.

I promised myself that the day New York City stopped being revelatory and beautiful to me, I would leave. That day hasn't come yet, and I'm still here.

I love my job. I arrive early and often leave late. On Sunday I think about all the things I am going to do the next day. I missed the purpose and urgency of having a job I really love. I used to stay late at Weatherspoon even when we didn't have events, just to go look at the De Kooning Woman one more time. So maybe I'm not a cartographer yet, my life spread out like a map, but this is the right time and place for me.

I told the boy from Austin that I would be here when he came back in the winter.

We're having a superhero party for Melanie's birthday. My superhero is the Blue Fairy. I think my UNCG blanket is going to be my cape.

This morning a man from Greensboro called in about a book query. Said he lived on the corner of Aycock and Walker, and time took a little breath. You seemed so close just then.

One year in September. Who knew that it would fly like this? I am not ready for twenty-three yet.

The Williamsburg Bridge at twilight is still my meaning of love. So, for now, here I stay.

There are signs of home everywhere. I think I see Jade on the subway and John Michael drumming for the French Kicks. Everyone is so familiar. Perhaps I am seeing the faces of people I love as a way of keeping them around; as a method of always remembering. I wish I had a photographic memory, but instead I remember in phrases and shadows. Leaving Union Pool after drinks with Dan, I get another call from friends who want to meet at the very same bar. Somehow my Greensboro reputation is inching its way here: I get called to consult and recommend places, getting credit for introducing the Manhattanites to Bembe and Zebulon and any number of thrift shops.

Slowly but definitely, I am adjusting to my nine-to-six lifestyle. Working at a literary agency has fueled my writing ambitions even more. If anything, the pace of work has made me better at organizing my time. This weekend, I hung out with the glorious Val and Kevin, caught part of the New Pornographers (no Neko Case!) show at Prospect Park, went to my first Mermaid Parade, frolicked at the beach, did laundry, got paint samples, and started work on a new chapter entitled "Stories That Have Nothing to Do with Deafness." Had time to take in Brooklyn from two separate rooftops, giggled under moonlight and had cocktails made with guava juice. Everyone leaves New York in the summer, goes to the Hamptons or Connecticut, but I'm more besotted than ever, still in awe of the East River twinkling at three AM, still awake with me. What is it about altitude that I love so much? Shannon's on a plane to England right now, Peter's on his roof at the corner of Ninth and Wythe (the address I always mangle), and all's right with the world.


Because everyone else is doing it, my five favorite songs right now:
-The Boy Least Likely To, "I'm Glad I Hitched My Apple Wagon To Your Star"
-Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, "Walking Through"
-Joni Mitchell, "Free Man in Paris"
-Spoon, "I Turn My Camera On"
-Aimee Mann, "Ghost World"

Dear Greensboro,

It was a year ago today that I left you.  One year ago today, Melanie, Kevin, Ernie, Jay, and Preston helped me throw my life into bags and boxes and I left Magnolia Street forever.  I was only able to close that door because I knew Rick would be the next one to open it.  I left there with the "H" from the bathroom sink hot water faucet in my pocket, round and silver, an immutable coin.

I don't miss you as much as I thought I would.  There were times here in this new city of mine that I thought I wouldn't make it, and that I never should have left you, and yet you kept popping up here.  I moved to Williamsburg, where the factories-cum-houses and mass availability of green tea reminded me of you.  Today, on the one year anniversary of the day I left you, I got a phone call offering me a full-time-salary-with-benefits job as the assistant to the head of music at one of the largest literary agencies in America.  I have an office between the New York Life building and Madison Square Park.  I know that you had a hand in this, Greensboro.  You are the best of lovers, not jealous, calling me on the phone to check up and make sure I have enough to eat.  I cannot thank you enough, Greensboro.  I want to finish the book I am writing about you and memorialize you forever, exactly as you were.  Were I to go back now, it wouldn't be the same.  You knew that I wasn't content to rest on my laurels.  When I do make it home, Greensboro, I will go to Fisher Park, have tea at the Green Bean and coffee at Tate Street, and you will hold me close like a river.

Tomorrow I am going to wake up at eight o'clock and go to work.  I get an hour for lunch.  Shannon and Lindsey are taking me out at five for celebratory drinks.  Kathryn says that people in New York are always looking for either an apartment, boyfriend, or job at any given time.  And Emily says that if the only thing missing or troubling in your life is a boy, you're doing pretty well for yourself.  They are both right.  Greensboro, I left you and thought I'd never survive, but I have a job that makes me happy, a whole house full of people I love, a porch and a roof and a tiny garden (peppermint and basil), a view of the Empire State building, neighborhood bars, and friends.  Everything New York City has given me, I think, you had a say in.  You wanted me to come home and made sure that I never would.  Greensboro, I wish I could be half as good as you are.

They say that the first year is the hardest.  I came to New York to get my ass kicked, and I did.  But so many wonderful people, places, and things have happened that I can't think of the past nine and a half months here in any light but a perfect one.  If it gets easier after this, then I have been blessed beyond all possibility.

Thank you.  I am not going to sign this letter, because you don't sign a prayer.