The Right Moves
When I was younger, I moved every 3 years. From China to Ohio to Maryland, back to Ohio, and then Washington, where I finally got to attend the same school for four years (at the conclusion of which we moved again, but at least within the same state). When my parents worried that moving so often was stunting my social development, I declared nonchalantly, “Don’t worry. I know we’re leaving, so I won’t get too close to anyone.” I took pride in being able to say goodbye to my friends without crying, in never missing anybody or anything.
Forty-eight hours ago, I got on plane which passed, at 30,000 feet, over almost every place I’ve ever lived. Around 9:30PM, I spotted my two previous apartments on Mercer Island and Bellevue, traced the I-90 all the way to Connie’s house in Issaquah, and looked south to Olympia, where I deluded myself into thinking I could see my neighborhood, somewhere amidst the glimmering candlewicks. In the middle of the night, a child looked out her window in Toledo, Ohio just like I did when I was seven or eight, pushing aside the curtains to gasp at what she thought was a shooting star. (But why was it blinking so much? Was it running out of battery?) As a kid, I always wondered who was onboard and if the people onboard knew about the people down below who were wondering about them. (Answer: No. The people onboard were trying, in vain, to sleep.) I like to think that, as dawn broke around 5AM, a tiny shadow of the wing tip passed over Maryland, too. But that’s a stretch.
At 6:40AM, I moved into my new dorm. I hate calling it a dorm—it’s more like a cheap apartment in a large building full of med students. I delayed my errands by walking around the neighborhood, the intersection of East Harlem and the Upper East Side. For a city that never sleeps, it sure was quiet on a Sunday at 8AM. I unpacked, halfheartedly. I piled all my things on my bed and, for once, was content to simply leave them there. It was as if moving in was synonymous with moving on—from Yale, from my summer in San Francisco, from being able to spend every day with the people I love. If I just stopped unpacking, maybe I could still go back, shove everything into my suitcases again, fly back to the other coast, put everything in reverse.
It’s not like I didn’t know this was coming. I thought I’d been slowly weaning myself from Yale, making the right preparations, ignoring excited status updates about Bluebooking, psyching myself up for med school and a life in New York. (Public transit! A Starbucks within 2 blocks! Prosperity dumpling every day!) But I think all I’ve really been doing is putting off the inevitable. I mean, I spent a whole night writing about my clusterfuck of feelings last month—you’d think I would have packed them all away by now. One overweight, duct-taped box of emotions. Handle with care.
Nooooope. I pushed open the door to my room and my first thought was that it wasn’t as nice as my room in Swing, I missed the weird floor tiles in Stiles (hah), the strangle polygonal rooms and awkward corners where nothing would fit. I miss looking out my window and seeing a courtyard or having a cozy library a few fuzzy-slippered steps away. After much consideration, I even missed having a door to my shower stall (but probably because I spent an inordinate amount of time at Target trying to pick out a shower curtain).
From the corner of my window I can see the train tracks. Forty-five times a day, a Metro North train will leave Grand Central, pass by my window, and make its way to New Haven. As I type this, I can hear one now, rattling on its way to Harlem/125th Street. My thoughts run away from me—what if I just… No. Stay put. It’ll get better. Gah.
I feel guilty angst-ing over New Haven because it’s preventing me from adjusting to Sinai. I don’t want to put away my suitcases or buy books or make new friends, because I can’t let go. My English books are sitting in boxes in my garage, 3000 miles away, and I regret not sucking it up and mailing them all to New York, just so I could look at them right now. My shelves are bare and I don’t want to see them sagging beneath the weight of enormous medical texts just yet. My heart is full from all the friends I’ve made over the past four years at Yale, and I’m not ready to open myself up again and start from scratch. At our first student mixer, I spent the time talking to a few Yalies and my friends from the HuMed program last summer. I don’t remember the names of any new people, and I probably didn’t talk to anyone long enough for them to remember me. Way to go, Sue. What an auspicious start.
I spent the rest of the evening wandering around Sara D. Roosevelt Park in Chinatown, boba in hand. I watched little kids crawling on the playground, teens and tweens playing basketball, old women and men crowded around the tables playing cards, and dozens of other people just like me, sitting on the benches or leaning against the fence, watching the aforementioned park-goers, watching me watching them. I didn’t want to go home, but then it got too dark and the basketball games slowed down and I left in a hurry, not wanting to see the park empty. My favorite place in New York City isn’t a restaurant or coffee shop or tourist attraction but a five-block park in the middle of Chinatown that hardly anyone has ever heard of.
Every day feels like a battle between me and New York, whose bright lights and five-star eateries offer, according to Grace, “the perfect distraction from truth.” In the end, New York will win. Just not yet. Right now my excursions into the city are like skimpy Band-Aids. They fall off the moment I return to my poorly decorated bedroom, and the cut is still raw. But one day I’ll come home—after coffee, a dinner date, a foray into the wilderness of undiscovered study spaces—and the Band-Aids will be lost, the wounds discreetly healed. My feelings will have “weathered away slowly” (Grace, again). I won’t feel a thing.