I'm in Texas
If you’ve ever felt increasingly restless as you stayed in New York City year over year and and dared to publicly vocalize your slight discomfort, I applaud you. It’s a strange occurrence, one I did not expect to come to me until I was in my thirties, at the earliest. I’m not going to go on record to say that New York is overrated because I don’t believe that. Not even one bit. There’s no sense in comparing it to anywhere else, and I don’t mean that in terms of the opinion many hold that it is inherently more fun, lively, exciting, or, better, than any other place. I don’t believe that to be the case. I just don’t think it parallel paths any other city or shares enough similarities for it to hold some top ranking on a weird Buzzfeed list of best places to live.
The desire to pack everything up and leave usually comes to me once a year. This time last year I escaped to Philadelphia for a bit. I went for many long walks. I saw old friends. I read in Rittenhouse Square every morning until a man called me a dumb fucking bitch for not accepting an invitation back to his apartment. It was nice. It was the right amount of separation from my baseline life, and I felt ready to go home when my rental was up.
I went to Austin, TX back in May with one of my best friends to hang out with one of our other best friends for a long weekend. It rained 50% of the time. Charlotte drove us around in a thunderstorm for a while and I thought my heart would burst. I couldn’t tell why.
The next day we went swimming and laid in the grass for a while, moments often passing with us not saying a word to each other. As I got ready for bed I looked around and realized how wonderful it was to be in a place where nearly no one, except for two of the people I had grown up with, knew who I was.
I’m back in Austin. I thought about going back to Philly because I love it in the fall. I considered California but didn’t want to work with the time difference.
I want to start exercising my free will when I feel like I don’t have it anymore. Sometimes I just forget about it. That is so terrifying to me.
I wanted to go where only a few people know me, not because I want to reinvent myself, but because I think it’s important to understand what kind of people I like to surround myself with. I don’t think I can authentically do that in New York when everyone knows someone who knows someone who has vaguely heard of you or at least thrown eyes on your Instagram at some point to come to a conclusion about your personality they will then bizarrely confidently pass on to a closer party. That all just likely comes with staying in a place for too long and may not be New York-specific, but in the city it often feels as though the opinions people form of you have already been preemptively swayed in one direction or another as a result of the weird small circles that manage to form.
I wanted to make the deliberate decision to give up some control even if I didn’t quite understand why I was doing it. I wanted to be in an environment where it’s physically impossible to have sticky thoughts because I’m so tired of having sticky thoughts and I think they’re tired of me. I wanted to be somewhere and with people I don’t feel like I need to look pretty for (this isn’t New York’s or its residents’ fault, but it is real).
In Austin, I watch my host tend to his garden while I work. He gives me fresh figs he’s grown. I walk to get coffee every morning and stop to pet the two golden retrievers that live on my block. I pop over to my best friend’s house after I finish working and sit in her kitchen and laugh so hard my stomach hurts. I meet new people who have no idea who I am. They have no idea what I looked like in New York. I am a vague sim to them and I know they will forget about me once I leave. I feel at peace knowing this.