Moving Forward, Moving Backward

I've been trying to keep up with my New York City people.

Perhaps even more difficult than with Chicago people, as Chicago friends had for the most part years of relationship history to step off with. I also left Chicago with a bit of a spring in my step. I imagined that everything would be better in New York. I thought I was off on another great adventure just like when I left Garland originally. When I left New York, I was retreating back to a safe place.

In the days following, in the first few weeks, I eagerly awaited every phone call, e-mail, every Facebook comment. I desired them to come more frequently, with more passion, with more urgency. I wanted them immediately. I needed them. And when they came—if they came—they were never enough, never enough emotions or telling or anything. I wanted to know them with the same intensity that I did when we sat next to each other on the couch, at the bar, in the lunch room. I wanted to know them in the way we knew each other as fellow people living in New York City, not as the girl in the rags looking in the window on the family eating a large a luxurious turkey dinner.

And it pains me when they don’t understand what those extra few moments, or days, or weeks, between responses mean to me. I want them to know my need. I need them to know my need. I want them to constantly stretch their hand to mine. I want them to yearn in the painful manner I feel. I want them to thrash and have horrid dreams and utter loneliness. I want their life to be as drastically different as my life has become, so that we can mourn together over the change, over the misery, over the utter need to have them nearly you, over the need for communication.

But that’s the final clue. Their life isn’t drastically different. They still wake up at the same time. They still take the R to the A and zoom to work. They still drink at the Dram Shop and watch Lost. They still walk over a gangway to get to work. They love and fuck and talk and dance and work and dream, all the same. The difference?

The lack of me.

And not to be self-deprecating, but that’s not much.

While they still complete those tasks above, I do not follow any of them. While they had everything the same, save me, nothing was the same for me, save (I thought hopefully) them.

Suddenly I was unemployed living with my parents in a city I hadn’t lived in in six years. I was driving again. I was going to unfamiliar places and doing unfamiliar things constantly. I was living in an alien world, drastically wanting for a familiar foothold to arise so that I could keep myself alive.

So I looked backwards. I looked back to New York for a constant. A constant that would cement the months I lived there in reality and make my current reality (an absurd mix of new and old) something with more breathable air. Something I could look at and assess and move on into. As I left New York behind, I needed to know that it would still be there with the same structures and life and people that I cohabitated with before I departed.

This looking backwards, this desire made those phone calls that much more important. And it made me that much angrier when those left behind did not reciprocate. They did not understand the urging and fear I was feeling. They did not comprehend the dire need I had for a link back. For a constant. They didn’t need a constant. Their lives were constant.

Their lives = the same - Me.


This is the inevitable problem with leaving like I did, with a smudge of woe and a distinct look backwards. Had I triumphantly marched into the distance, I think I would have wanted to keep in touch with those left behind because I wanted to still have them in my life, not because I needed their presence.

It’s abating now. The realization of the innate changes in the dynamic of our relationships (and perhaps the notion that the those left behind have no idea of the vapid wasteland I am sometimes part of) made it easier to calm. But its still there looming in the corner, an ever-present search and miss. A yearning that will not fully ever subside. The water stain the hides under the carpet after all of the flood has subsided.


A step forward,
a look backward,
an inverted fall,
a climb back up
and continuing on.


And a crazed need to be connected to what was.