Goodbye New England

On (not) moving to Boston

In the last dregs of summer, a friend and I had our palms read. We were in the West Village, tipsy from our generous margaritas and the thrill of our new, high-tech fake IDs, when we saw the lit window advertising psychic readings. Did we?—we tossed the idea back and forth until one of us knocked on the door. Seduction is key to the art of fortune-telling. To the sophisticate, it’s all game except when the cards confirm that which you so long to hear. At twenty, our wants were not dissimilar from the wants of the human species: to know we chose well and that the best was yet to come.

Three weeks ago, I visited a friend in Boston to determine if Boston was where I wanted to live while revising my novel. Squaring Boston against New York when New York and L. A are the country’s self-evident cultural poles, might strike the reader as pure East Coast partisanship, except that for graduates of the NESCAC the binary comes down to those players: Boston vs. NYC. In the big debate, my favorite was always clear. Since I was five years old, I loved New York as only a Philadelphia kid, looking at their skyline and wanting moremoremore can. New York: muse of artists and writers, set of rom coms (and where my parents met and fell in love), a city so mythic even the water tastes better. My adolescence was peppered with trips to the city where thrumming with the energy of so much striving, I vibrated with the future I imagined as my destiny. One July, I walked the length of the city, uncomplaining as the shoestrings of my platform Converse grew wet with blood. My friend lent me a pair of her socks, and we kept going.  

So how did I land on Boston? Thanks to its size and proximity to nature, Boston can feel like a Middlebury 2.0. And Boston is cheaper than New York. Sort of. Depending on where you look. The ride from Logan to my friend’s office was surprisingly quick. She warned me she didn’t work in a picturesque area of the city, but the faint fog and circling seagulls were soothing reminders of the nearby sea. On the walk to her office, I stopped at the sight of a bunny playing in the grass. I wasn’t used to such docile urban wildlife. We did many of the tourist things: browsing Beacon Hill, walking Cambridge from Davis to Kendall, pasta in the North End, Newbury Street, and a visit to Beacon Hill Books twice. My first hours as a tourist were spent reading a book I had brought, Either/Or, in the Boston public gardens where the ducks and the cultivated grounds gave me an impossible feeling of peace. I thought I had made my decision; I picked the road more traveled.

That weekend, I was in the habit of asking my friends if my decisions surprised them so that someone, anyone, could validate my nascent trajectory. Almost uniformly, my friends said that my pursuing a life driven by writing was far less surprising than the alternative. It was my brief foray into networking that surprised them or, the decision to pick Boston when I’d always been so partial to New York. Moving to Boston felt, “more adult,” one of my friends remarked and I turned the words over in my mouth, deciding if I was ready to make “adult” choices which were at the expense of a youthful hedonism I couldn’t get back once it was gone.

On my second night in Boston, I went to a housewarming party that was, paradoxically, intended to celebrate the end of a sublet. The host was a girl I went to college with, and I talked mostly to a small circle of college people. I was bored and then, before I realized it, stupidly drunk. Fittingly, the book I started that weekend was set in the heroine’s sophomore year at Harvard where she begins to experiment with drinking and party culture: “Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable” (234). The next morning, as my stomach lurched in tandem with the T I was reminded there are few people more intolerable than the young artist.

Several hours before my flight, I recognized the constriction of breath that was the prelude to my anxiety attacks. I was queasy and not just from the pizza grease and caffeine unhappily cohabitating in my stomach. Since I announced my Boston intention, the visit was a stall against decision. Now the visit was up and I lost my license for procrastination. I had enjoyed seeing my friends, but I was ready, eager, to leave. The party reminded me of the aspect of Middlebury that most dissatisfied me: the conformist attitude that produced so many lawyers and consultants and very few people who took art more seriously than a hobby. In Cambridge’s squat, flatness that reminded me of strip malls I saw the final months of my senior year where my ambitions, which are an urban cliché, were lonely and strange.

My flight took off three hours after it was originally scheduled to leave. This left me with ample time to think. I looked down at my ruined feet, casualties of my new Birkenstocks. Before we walked through Cambridge, I applied bandages on the parallel sides of my feet until, frayed by the force of friction, the skin of my feet flaked and bled. I offer such a grossly descriptive image because, since graduating, I’ve thought about sacrifice. Sacrifice is intrinsic to life; at every crossroads, knowingly or otherwise, we play out the calculus of sacrifice and decide which comforts are worth the gamble. My tenure in the journalism employment pool afforded me a primer on my sacrifice calculus. I call it the Iowa test. If I was offered a job reporting in a sleepy Iowa town I would likely pass, but I would be ecstatic at the prospect of moving to Iowa for an MFA.

I’ve walked countless miles in New York, sweaty and sad, with my feet so sore you could cut them off, but no ache stopped me from wanting to join the party. Selin’s, the protagonist of Either/Or, narrative arc is defined by the quest for aesthetic life; she wants to be a writer and considers her life through that paradigm: will it make me a better writer? In pursuit of this ambition, she loses her virginity because sex and love are at the root of the canon, reads and reads, and spends her summer working in Turkey and Russia. What young writer doesn’t understand the anxiety of living well in pursuit of worthwhile material? I went to Dublin because Oxford’s a postcard, but the writers were in Dublin and when I retrace the calculus I think, “Did it make me a better writer?” and wouldn’t choose different. One of the great advantages of writing is that you can do it anywhere. However, the kinetic energy required for the young writer who needs other people no matter how much they enjoy their own company discriminates among cities. New York, I decided at thirty thousand feet. Where else?

I think a lot about fate which is to say I think a lot about chance. If I had a better time at the party, if my feet didn’t hurt so much, or, if I read a different book would I deplane with Boston on my mind? It’s disturbing to imagine how many of our most important decisions are undergirded by the combination of random phenomena. There’s another way to look at it. Why did I buy a book about the artist as a young woman if didn’t want someone to tell me to stop being afraid?

This brings me back to the psychic. She was small and blonde, not older than twenty-three, and the vape in her hand gave her a strange, preternatural authority. At twenty, we most wanted to query the universe about boys. She told my friend the boy she liked wouldn’t talk to her again (this was true) and that if she chose to be a lawyer, she would be spiritually unfulfilled. I was on the right career path, she said. However, just as in seduction, fortune-telling is foiled by logistics. The psychic told me I would be in a relationship in a month and a half and that my aura was deep purple, “very rare.” “Deep purple—very rare,” we giggled, deepening our voices in an imitation of hers until a boy broke my heart that fall, my friend enrolled in law school, and we stopped telling that story. I still remember the giddiness of that night: hands shaking as I paid for gum at the bodega and the conversation that unfolded until three as I imagined I was at the start of something. And, in a way, I was.

My junior year was when I got serious about writing. The night before classes started some friends and I drove out to the lake to light incense at the edge of the dock and confess our manifestations for the upcoming semester. We didn’t manifest anything tangible (boys, grades, etc.) but how we might respond when those tangible wants tortured us; we manifested resilience. Even with the COVID of it all, junior fall was my stormiest semester. I cried a lot and walked through campus in a bright red raincoat that might have been a warning: emotional gunslinger, quick to provocation. I began to spend more time alone. Days were lost in the library stacks where I worked tirelessly on juvenile stories that were the only means by which I would get better and said aloud when asked about my future, “I want to be a writer. I am a writer.”

            Even in more literate times, deciding to pursue a career as a writer is a decision against logic. The best writers’ early careers are peppered with rejection and economic struggle. At every turn, there is a sound reason to stop to try your hand at something less hard. So, besides talent and luck, I think it comes down to faith. A belief that can only be called religious as it resists the advice of soothsayers, statistics, and the opinions of well-meaning friends and neighbors.  This is the first fall that I’m not going back to school. Like I expected, it feels weird and sad, and I miss the trees and my friends terribly, but I know it’s for the best. My four years in Vermont were an idyll of sweaters, smiles, and babydoll florals designed to soften my edges. This summer I began the project of culling; I got my most substantial haircut since 2019, wore my nightguard when I slept and started to buy more black. These are superficial totems but, in those totems, I said goodbye New England, goodbye.