Ghost

I wasn't feeling particularly well that day to begin with. Tuesdays tend to be extremely slow at work and I hadn't slept well the night before. When Rebecca walked in my immediate reaction was panic. I guess that's typically how I feel when separate worlds collide like that. I felt strangely exposed with this girl who I mostly knew from parties years ago standing in the restaurant. Which is especially strange in light of how brutally exposed she always seemed to me. So pale and small. So unabashedly in love with boys who clearly didn't care about her. So uncomfortably idolatrous of our lives. We talked and she still seemed bizarrely overexposed, immediately volunteering how unhappy she was with her job and where she lived. She went on to recall how cool she thought we were four years ago. We ("your crew," she said) had seemed like everything she wanted to be at the time. I feel something close to vertigo trying to imagine how we looked to her, even all this time later. Smoking cigarettes on the windowsills, playing cards, drinking constantly, always dressed deliberately strangely. Four years ago I felt like I knew this city, I had a place, a community maybe.

I felt ashamed. Like I had let her down or something. By becoming this mid-twenties waitress without direction. Who always meant to keep in better touch with that electrically close group of friends. Who hadn't done anything at all cool lately. Who was dressed in black and wearing cheap, conservative stud earrings.

It's weird to be moving away. I am sort of afraid that I have stayed here too long. That a particularly New York brand of cynicism has seeped into my perspective. Looking back on those first two years I can hardly retrace how I ended up here. In Queens, twenty-six, perhaps permanently single. And when I get on that plane, how will all of this New York-ness subside? In what pockets and corners will it store itself? And once I have done it, have realized my purpose, my desires, my self, will I call you all and tell you about it? And we'll laugh and understand each other based on all that time together, all those years ago?

Tonight I was on the R train (taking the longest route home possible) and when passing through the Courtlandt Street subway station and I started to think about the newspapers on the platform and whether they were from seven years ago. And then I started to think about how that was seven years ago. And then I realized today is the four year anniversary of my move to New York City.

Right after that I thought about the perfect poem to describe that feeling of how the general history reminded me of my particular history and how it was all sort of uncertain and nostalgic. But I just spent about twenty minutes looking through Google for this poem and I don't think it exists after all. Which makes me wish I had a photographic memory so I would always be able to quote exactly what poem I was thinking of. Or maybe I should just write my own poems. Or go to bed.

Book Discussion Group: On imagery and nostalgia

On my way home from work tonight I had this strong bout of nostalgia for a college I never attended. It was a longer wait for the F train than usual and I was reading to pass the time. I started Americana by Don DeLillo earlier this week, mostly because it seems like everyone is always talking about how great he is, and even though I don't feel like I'm really into it (like I won't read another chapter instead of going to sleep at night), I like it. Anyhow, between the wait and the train ride I was probably reading for almost an hour. And I was thinking about this conversation I had with my friend Jean last night about descriptions of place and how important they are to stories and, at least so far, Americana takes place in New York City, so the descriptions are vivid in this way that they are not only so obviously and brilliantly concocted out of images from the mid-twentieth century cultural zeitgeist, but they are also images and places I live among everyday (or at least to the extent that I am in Manhattan, which is often enough).

So my nostalgia had to do with this fantasy I have about what life in "normal college" dorm is like. In this nostalgic reverie I pictured myself returning to the dorms at one-thirty in the morning and going down to the second floor (because my nostalgia is specific enough to place me on the fourth) to knock on the door of some dreamy English major I knew would be up (probably reading Proust or something awful like that). Anyhow, we would sit on his bed at a perpendicular angle to one another, with my back against the wall at the head of the bed and his against the wall against the length of the bed, and eventually, after dissecting imagery and the power of the ego in literature or whatever words we were using to mean "It's really fucking good the way he says that," I would tuck my feet under his thighs and we would feel really close but probably not even kiss because those situations always feel too heavy and cliche anyhow.

This fantasy is fraught for several reasons, starting with my cynical disdain for English majors and Proust. But also because it reveals the ways that my college experience was purposefully a-typical in a way that highlights how my late teens were to a large degree shaped by a desire to be "a-typical" and how it's strange but I sometimes regret that. But really only because lately my life is full of times like now when it's after three in the morning and I can't think of a single person who it would be appropriate to call in order to discuss literature. Maybe I'm just too old for that.

But when I came home I was glad to find Richard awake and we drank beers and watched the season finale of Greek, which is really a fantastically sincere show, but maybe feeds my college nostalgia-regret fantasies a little too much.