image courtesy of Aldon

One Monday morning in early August, I was walking down 23rd street in Manhattan when a voice in my head yelled, “I want to get out of here.” Impressed by its sureness (I am a champion of ambivalence), I jumped online as soon as I got to work. I googled Cape Cod Community College and looked up their Language and Literature Dept. After a couple minutes of sleuthing, I found the name and email of the department chair. Ten minutes later, I had sent a carefully-tailored introduction of myself and job query to Ms. Polito. I told the voice in my head, “There.”

Over the past month, I’d been visiting my boyfriend on the Cape on the weekends and though he’d urged me to move, I’d always said, “What about work?” as though I would never be able to get a job there that wasn’t miserable. The truth was that I could do what I did in Manhattan on the Cape – if CCCC was hiring.

The work day rolled on in its familiar pattern. I chatted with my coworker Christine about our ESL Immersion kids and how we thought each would do on his or her upcoming ACT test. The dim lighting lulled me into a sense of being outside of time, outside of anything ever changing. But when I went to check my email around noon, I had received a reply from Sally Polito. She said that indeed, there were classes in need of instructors for the Fall semester. After a couple more emails, an interview was scheduled. 

Exactly a month later, I found myself walking down 23rd St. for the last time. I did feel a sense of relief, but I also felt a strong sense of loss. I’d been in New York long enough to grow roots. I felt like I was ripping them all out and, as many were intertwined with other people’s roots, I felt their discomfort as well. In some ways, I felt like I was betraying people, like living in New York really is a race and to peel off and leave is the same as quitting. Though I felt all this, I also knew it was just one way of looking at it. I think while living in New York, you often feel like your life is given meaning just by virtue of living in New York. Like War, New York is a force that gives us meaning. Being a New Yorker, or Brooklynite, if you will, can be an identity. For myself, I felt this taking over and I wanted to recapture the reigns of forging who I was and who I would be. In a way, New York had made it very easy to stay in one place. But I was ready to grow and to do that, I needed to liberate myself.

I’d fantasized about leaving New York almost since I’d arrived. I wrote two plays about it. In both, a character makes a dramatic exit for some wild environment. In the first,  it’s the Everglades and in the second, an undisclosed open field. It was a coincidence that a person I met in New York and later fell in love with would happen to live in a wild place, a place where you can walk a half mile and look out over a small lake surrounded by forest and see not one other human being.

My third morning in Cape Cod, I woke up and saw the sun shining brightly outside. I’d gone to bed homesick, but the morning light made me feel hopeful about this new place. I put on my clogs and started walking. Along my way, the only people I passed were landscapers and a woman picking tomatoes from her garden. I turned onto a gravel road. As I approached the edge of the land, I saw vivid blue water beyond it, wide and rippling. I looked to my left and saw no one. I looked to my right and saw no one. I felt a rise of elation in my chest. Here, here, I had made it to the place my characters had been longing to go. A wild place.

Why was this wild, open space so meaningful to me? In the city, illusions and commercial messages clogged my mind, inviting constant negative reactions that elbowed out room for active, creative thought. Here, there were no posters for Cougar Town or live HSBC bank promotions taking over Madison Square Park to analyze and, ultimately, feel superior to. Here, instead of feeling negative about and better than my surroundings, I was completely humbled. From this humbled state, I felt I could more authentically pursue my creative work and personal life. In the city, it felt like the songbird in my chest was muffled; here at the pond I felt it clamor robustly with life, push out its chest and sing.

William Blake said, “Sooner strangle a babe in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” Even when I was boxing up books and dishes in my beloved Brooklyn apartment and wondering if leaving a fully-fledged life in New York was the stupidest thing I’d ever done, I told myself that I had to follow this unbidden desire to its conclusion or bear the consequences of its suffocation.

As I stood overlooking that pond, I knew that I had made the right choice. I didn’t miss the walk down 23rd St., not even the intersection of 23rd, Broadway and Fifth that had always felt to me so important, like the confluence of great rivers. Once I had stood at that intersection and fantasized about stopping traffic to protest against war, in defense of life. Now I stood at my pond, finally living in defense of my own.