return to new york

dear friends,

I returned from Paris three weeks ago to find myself floating, ghost-like, through my New York City life. at my apartment, I touched my things with a strange lack of recognition. these porcelain mugs I made, this thirsty cacti I cared for, these framed watercolors I painted. none of it felt like it belonged to me, nor did I belong to it; this collection of things making up a place I call “home.”

I thought to myself that I felt more at home sleeping on friends’ couches in Europe — more at home in my being, I mean, with just one suitcase of things: a foldable yoga mat, tango shoes, a set of watercolors, a leather journal, clothes I washed and hung out to dry in friends’ living rooms.

I felt more at home dancing in dark milongas where I knew no one, in the embraces of men I had just met; and for a while, more comfortable as a stranger in a new country where I didn’t even speak the language — than as a citizen of this borrowed one.

do you know what I mean?

or would you just call this… “vacation blues?”

when they asked, “are you visiting for work, or for holidays?” I would reply, “are those the only two options?”

when they asked, “did you go to Europe looking for answers?” I would reply, “no. but I found answers to questions I didn’t even know I was asking.”

after a month in three countries, I discovered how travel can be lived as an open-ended, ongoing question; a field study on ways of seeing, a rigorous exercise for my psyche, a gentle investigation of my yearnings. now, I remember my travels not for its novelty and adventure, but for the feeling it lent me: an untouchable sense of safety and belonging in my own skin, solidity within my being. my sense of self was no longer defined by the distance to my heart’s varied attachments, but fully contained in me.

I used to wonder if I would live my entire life restless - a child immigrant’s curse; to be neither born and raised in one country, nor to have chosen to immigrate by will. I’ve found that the cure for restlessness is not unattached roaming, but to seek true home, like true north. home not as place, things, or people, but home as a feeling. maybe the way to travel is to find stillness while in movement, and the way of home is to find movement while in stillness. home and travel, the same.

it took a few weeks of re-assimilation, but eventually, new york city baked itself into me, again. it was as if the gravity of heat waves sunk me into its concrete gridlock, and I got used to this life: waiting twenty minutes in humid stations for delayed trains, walking with financiers and tourists in midtown east, passing a mere suggestion of sunset between sheaths of glass buildings.

one evening, somewhere along sixth avenue and fifty third street, I saw a man kneeling down on a piece of cardboard by the side of a halal cart. I thought he was begging for food, but then he stood up, put his shoes back on, and another man took his place on the cardboard. it was then that I realized that I was in new york city, where this sort of thing happened. next to a line of thirty people from twenty countries waiting for a plate of chicken and rice, men lined up to kneel on the sidewalk, towards Mecca.

a dear friend from Paris said to me: sometimes the body arrives first, and the soul takes much longer to arrive. over these weeks, I could feel my soul arriving, slowly. not by choice, but because it had to. it wanted to be with my body.

in this slow arrival, the sensory deluge of new york city helped. one evening, I sat inside Saint Patrick’s cathedral, eyes closed, feeling within me the slow dripping of time. on the other side of stained glass windows, the sky was darkening against a faint rumble of thunder. when the cathedral closed, we - the tourists, the locals, the devout, the non-devout - were ushered out into the dark downpour.

on Fifth Avenue, the storefronts were bright and empty. the headlights of yellow taxi cabs illuminated thick rain and flooded crosswalks, where we, a small stream of pedestrians, ran with our shoulders hunched, bags and hoods over our heads, each to our own destinations. I enjoyed this feeling of disappearing. the relief and isolation of being alone, yet together.

so sometimes new york city rains like this, in buckets. and we cannot enter subways, let alone walk home, without wading through puddles, arriving at our doorsteps with soaked shoes and socks. there is something almost biblical about this kind of storm, something at once apocalyptic and cleansing. this is how the city helps me center and ground fully in it. by flooding me, and seeing if I drown.

in a few weeks, I’ll be in my tenth year in this city. to say it’s been a difficult home would be an understatement. I can feel myself nearly ready to seek home elsewhere; a new city, a new continent. but for now, I’ve been lent a sense of here-ness, of embodiment, of feeling my own weight on earth. and I feel such gratitude, such relief.
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