2 October 2014

Is it possible to feel restless and settled at the same time? When I first started blogging (infrequently, navel-gazingly, in-my-head, only-sharing-with-friends, oh-my-god-i-hope-no-one-reads-this anonymously), I chose this url as my moniker. It seemed to suit me. The world is going to hell in a hand basket, amiright, and also it is full of beautiful, rich, simple moments of bliss and humor. When I actually had a more focused project in mind (which devolved into no focus, after the impetuous behind the project–quitting my job–became a non-starter due to my pressing need to become re-employed so as to afford things like food and a roof over my head), I started a new blog. And now I am back here, in my original bloggy home, updated to a fancy new responsive design, writing to my audience of maybe five people who, years ago, bookmarked this sight because they were either related to me or benevolent friends trying to be supportive. Hello, five people. I’m back.

Restless and settled is what I feel these days. After fourteen years in NYC, an MFA, and flailing attempts to Be A Writer, thwarted by the daily sisyphean task of Affording To Live In A City I Cannot Afford To Live In, I find myself back in Charm City, where I had lived for three years prior to The New York Experiment. Feeling settled because I am a new home owner, and newly engaged to someone I actually like spending copious amounts of time with (an improvement on past relationships, believe me), among friends I want to grow old with and whose children delight me.

But also restless, because half of my brain is stuck on the Brooklyn setting. I still listen to WNYC for my daily dose of NPR, my Facebook feed is still more New York than Baltimore, and every morning I dream of biting into a sublime New York bagel.

I love that here, instead of an hour commute clinging to a pole, shifting my feet, and silently cursing hipsters, I get to sit on my front porch and read (usually a novel or, yes, The New Yorker). I love that, when I step out my back door, the crickets are deafening and the sky is a bucket full of stars.

But I miss the stimulation of New York City, the connectedness, the ability to get anywhere or anything you want at any time, the 24 hour bodegas, the joyful hot mess of the city’s inhabitants. When I went back recently for a 24 hour work-related reason, I had the confounding and somehow comforting experience of feeling like NYC was an alternate reality that I still lived in, in real time, alongside my new front porch, bucket of stars reality. NYC remains my present tense, at the same time that Baltimore is my present, past and future tense.

I don’t have to choose. I don’t have to give up that thing that I fought fourteen years to cling to. (Phew.) As with most modern nomads, my sense of home is multi-layered, does not center around one particular location or time period, but is everything and everywhere at once, new locations and experiences forever being patched on so that the original is unrecognizable. And so I have come full-circle back to Apocalyptic Whimsy, back to Charm City, fully steeped in everything and everywhere I have existed in my slightly humorous madness, and I shall endeavor to embrace said madness, dear five readers, in my subsequent posts.