Manhattan No. 1

 "The street below was dim and quiet. Across it the moon was shining above the trees in Old St. John's, just behind the great dark head of the lion on the monument. Anne wondered if it could have been only that morning that she had left Green Gables. She had the sense of a long passage of time which one day of change and travel gives. 'I suppose that very moon is looking down on Green Gables now,' she mused. 'But I won't think about it. That way homesickness lies. I'm not even going to have my good cry. I'll put that off to a more convenient season and just now I'll go calmly and sensibly to bed and to sleep." 

(Anne of the Island, L.M. Montgomery) 

When I watched my dad and brothers drive off down Greenwich Street, leaving me on the stained curb outside my building,  I expected a sense of abandonment to fully encompass my soul. But as they rounded the corner-arms still waving out the windows, as is tradition- I found myself breathless with change, but grounded by a celestial peace. 

Kaleigh and I trooped up the five flights of gray steps to my matchbox apartment, and stepped inside. "Do you need anything else before I go?" she asked kindly. I shook my head and mustered a smile. 

"Nope, I'll be just fine." Her eyes squinched in what I assumed to be a kind smile beneath her mask and she shut the door, leaving me to the bare bones of an apartment so small my mom said I "would need to step outside just to change my mind!" After she left, I sat on the naked mattress and cried. 

I waited for the crushing loss to hit me and replace this warm peace in my heart with its cold fear. but miraculously, it never came. 

In the past nine days I have become well-acquainted with my loss and my privilege. Being stripped of your community- even voluntarily, because yes, I am aware that I did this to myself- is very telling. It shows you all the areas of your soul propped up on other people. I feel very much like a dock whose pilings have rotted out from underneath her-or more aptly yet, were stolen in the night, and now stands on just two or three legs. There are parts of me I never had to hold before that now require my personal attention. 

My dad is no longer behind me when I'm doing homework at 1 AM. His comforting presence does not reside in the living room next door. His gravelly, "You can do this," has been replaced by my own tear-choked voice. And when I wake the next morning my mother's music does not play. The only voice I will hear is my roommate's, and the only music that will play will be of my choosing. 

Sadness before could be alleviated by a tight hug from my mom or a ridiculous conversation with my little brother or an easy drive around the block. Now my sadness lives in the only place I can call my own in this whole city. I can't blame her for sticking around. She hasn't anywhere else to go. But now I am finding that my family and my friends were so much better equipped at showing her the door than I am. 

In these past ten days of quarantine I have been restricted from getting to know the city, and forced to get to know myself. My shortcomings and mistakes. My vices and sins. Every part of me that found it's death in the love and support of my community has raged to life in their absence.

I do not know this city any better than I did ten days ago, but the roads and paths of my soul have become increasingly, painfully, miraculously more familiar. 

When I was packing my trunk to move to Manhattan (yes I did bring an actual wooden trunk, sue me) I told myself to only bring books I had yet to read. I had five or six of them on my shelf that I'd been meaning to get to, so I tucked them inside, sparing a backwards glance for my well-loved volumes of Alcott and Austen. But at the last moment I also grabbed my raggedy lilac-covered copy of Anne of the Island. She has been read many times through, but I  knew I would need her in the days to come. 

Anne feels things much like me. She is always yearning for new and exciting things, but loves her present reality so deeply that she finds it painful to leave. She is strong, but sentimental. Logical, but full of feeling. Desperate to hold onto her past, and simultaneously eager to embrace her future. 

On Saturday, my quarantine will be over and I will meet new people and go new places.

On  Saturday, I will become acquainted with this city. 

But for now, I will become acquainted with this soul and the plans God has for it. 

Oh, how I know they are far better plans than my own.