The only constant is change

If I had to come up with a theme for this story, it would be change.  This is the story of how I changed my life, and how it continues to change.  It’s such a funny idea.  Change is everywhere and is happening all the time.  It is all around us, occurring at a million different rates.  If there is one thing in life that is constant and reliable, it is change.  But when change happens, our emotions escalate.  We become ecstatic, overcome, heartbroken, amazed, devastated.  Change is never easy and it is never simple, but it is always there.

I am a different person today than I was yesterday, and I will be a different person tomorrow too.  Every moment I am changing and learning something new about myself and the world around me.  Someone once told me that all of the cells in our body regenerate themselves every 7 years.  I don’t know if this is true, but I like the idea.  Every 7 years, you are a completely different you.  But the change happens so slowly, so minutely, that you don’t notice it until all of sudden you’re different.  I didn’t wake up one day, snap my fingers, and become a runner.  It was a slow, long change that took place over time.  And one day I looked back on things and thought to myself, “When did I become a runner?”

Since I moved to Seattle, I have changed in many ways.  I’m happier, more outgoing, more comfortable in uncomfortable situations.  The person that left New York City in August of 2008 is not the same person I am today.  Much of that person is still inside me, but there are bits and pieces that have changed a great deal.  And it is those bits and pieces that have made all the difference. 

When Lucy and I packed up and left New York, I rented a U-Haul trailer and attached it to a trailer hitch I had installed on my car just for that purpose.  My mom, a woman who loves doing puzzles, came to help me pack up and puzzled all of my life into that tiny trailer.  We managed to fit a couch, a mattress, a desk, a table, and a ton of boxes in it.  I don’t think there was an inch of room to spare.  Then we drove my little Honda Civic across New York State back to my parents, crossing our fingers that the engine didn’t overheat in the August sun while struggling to pull like the Little Engine That Could.

Leaving NYC was harder than I thought it would be.  New York City is the city of dreams.  People who have never been there imagine that it is this place where miracles happen and the world is different.  This is somewhat true, but obviously an idealized version of the city.  However, I had become accustomed to being a New Yorker.  I liked watching movies or TV shows like Law and Order and being able to pick out exactly where certain shots were filmed.  I loved picking apart impossible settings—an actor coming out of a subway station in Chelsea and suddenly finding herself on the Upper East Side by 5^th Ave.  I got a kick out of it.  I felt special living in New York.

It was those little things that were hard to say goodbye to.  I loved the nuances and hidden pieces of beauty you could find throughout the city.  Subway doors look like this:  

Once, I was riding the L train out of Brooklyn into Manhattan and noticed that one of the lower black stickers that reads “Do not lean on door” had been very perfectly replaced by an identical sticker that read “Do not fall in love.”  Unless you were looking closely and actually reading the words that nobody bothers to read, you would never have noticed it.  In New York City, you have to look at the details to find the poetry in the world.

This year for my holiday trip back to the East Coast, I decided to fly into NYC and spend a few days reminiscing about the life I once led.  It was the first time I had stepped foot in the city since I said goodbye to it 3 ½ years ago.  I’m not sure what I expected from this visit.  But I wanted to go…I wanted to feel and see and touch the change I had experienced over the past few years.  Only by going back to the beginning, to the root of the story, do you really see all the changes that have manifested themselves on the journey.

I think I wanted it all to be different.  I wanted to go back to Brooklyn, to visit the places I’d spent my “entering real life” years and have it all be different.  As if by me leaving, this entire city would redirect its course.  But a lot was the same.  The dog park was still there, and even though it had new benches and new dogs, it was still the same.  I visited a few old apartment buildings.  I’m sure their insides were filled with new souls floating through life, but their shells had not changed.  My favorite neighborhood bagel store, with its unobtrusively subtle name still stood with its ever-changing, often politically-inspired murals.

New dogs enjoying the same old dog park.

The converted burlap factory where me and 2 roommates built the walls of the empty loft we rented.  Someone else in now enjoying the fruits of our labor.

My first NYC apartment, looking more dilapidated than ever.  The Thai restaurant underneath still going strong.

Best bagels ever--huge and gooey and overloaded with cream cheese.

            I think I also wanted it all to be the same.  I wanted to go back to the city, visit the old haunts, and feel that time had stopped moving after I left.  But a lot was very different.  The Williamsburg waterfront has been consumed by large condos and even a boardwalk.  A little city of convenience stores has built up around these condos, along a street that used to be filled with dilapidated, empty factories.  They’ve even started relining many streets throughout the city to include bike lanes.  This was unheard of a few years ago.

2 off these were in the process of being built when I moved, the rest weren't there.  The boardwalk didn't exist...to get to the water, you had to sneak through the fence of an old factory.

This road used to be deserted.  Even the sidewalk is new.

            The result of my walk down memory lane, through this living, breathing organism of a city was somewhat anticlimactic.  I expected to feel different, to be touched by some unnamable feeling.  But in the end, it all felt normal.  I fell right back into that weird borderline state of feeling at home in a city that one can never feel at home in.  On my last night there, as I was leaving dinner with my dad and brother, I commented that I felt as though I could be walking back to the subway, hopping on a train to go back to my apartment.  As if I didn’t live on a completely different coast now, in a completely different life.  As if nothing had changed.  It was deceiving and disconcerting that my body and mind could fall so easily back into old habits.  I guess you just can’t leave 6 years of life behind you so easily.

            Since leaving NYC with my mom at my side, Lucy cramped in the back seat, and my little Honda loaded down by the weight of my life, things have changed.  I am glad for the changes that have happened, but I am oddly comforted by the feeling that some things haven’t changed.  Somewhere inside me, there is a place where NYC will always live.  If I had known that 3 ½ years ago, I would have hated the idea.  But I like it now.  Even though life is constantly changing, somewhere in your soul is a place where all the old things reside.  All the old feelings, places, people, disappointments, hopes, and dreams are still there.  You just have to remember to go back and find them every now and then.