meditation on: innie-outie
In the rain, a run over Sweetgreen bowl on Atlantic looks for a second like a horseshoe crab. The Navy Yard smells like Catalina Island sometimes, gas leaking out of the golf carts going uphill. The beach at Rockaway, if you close your eyes, could be any beach except for the smell, and the plastic straw stuck between your toes. The Governor’s Island ferry, if you look directly down at the water, feels just like the Vinalhaven ferry. The result, obviously, much different, not so much a blue-collar lobstering town as an egregiously catered tandem bike and Montauk-on-tap daycation for city-dwellers who fear another summer speeding by indoors.
I can remember, without effort, every time I went to the beach in the last year. Last time I held a horseshoe crab was in Cape May in the freezing cold, sometime around Christmas I guess because there was a decorated tree on the beach. My little brother graduated from boot camp that week and I hosted fake Christmas at my apartment and cried on the subway from being so stressed out trying to cram all six of my family members into my apartment for holiday dinners, and sleeping.
In June of last year, after my grandma’s funeral, we sat on Huntington Beach—my whole family, which is rare besides these occasions—swathed in tablecloths from her house we’d sell a month later and ate wake ham-and-cheese sandwiches filled with sand. Watched the sunset, fought seagulls off.
I went to Coney Island in April after work and waited around in the cold for a Cyclones game to start. Listened to an entire Helen album my boyfriend had sent me before I’d actually ever met him. I went back to Rockaway twice in June and had piña coladas from a bag, Coronas from a bottle, took pictures of the women at the beach tanning in their untied triangle tops, vaping, Minute Maid-ing.
Two weeks ago I was at the beach in Maine with Miles laying shells on his chest, new to me. The chest and everything else. I’d known him in real life for a week then, following a 7-month internet courtship that started while he was somewhere in Argentina. He slept hard on a cabana towel after we ate a bag of salt and vinegar chips and talked about how we felt about each other. I looked for shells and got back in the water and then laid my cheek on his sweaty back until it was time for lunch.
Summer’s over in the sense that it’s been raining for a week, I have no more vacation planned, and I have an interview for a commerce position at a reputable magazine in an hour. In preparation, I have to Google things like “tentpole coverage,” and how exactly we know the right keywords for SEO. I text Miles, “I’m googling KPI’s to give us a better life.” Yes, yes, still trying to Make It here, that slimy ambitious terminology we save for this cruel city only.
I say all the time I won’t move again until I move to the beach. I don’t want to live anywhere else. I can’t fathom spending the thousands it takes to move just to go somewhere else without water. The beach is my better life, the place of my pre-supposed element. The KPI’s and its associated company (see: SEO, CRM, B2B, etc.), I’ve strategized, are the way out—monetizing my creative brain to finance its fancy proclivities. New York is the thing to get out of, the chokehold being that you don’t feel you can get out until you’ve gotten in. Making it in some prideful sense before you can make your way out of it. It’s all made up, you know, and the metrics of it are nothing—of being known or seen or validated by invitation. We are masters of our own fate etc., the ones to decide when we’ve felt validated enough. Everybody knows that abstractly, everybody that’s hoarse from screaming their self-importance into the city’s ether. Everybody that swarms the carcass of Emily Ratajkowski’s public profile postulating critical commentary like flies on a chewed and abandoned burger.
Any viral think piece these days will show you women (myself strongly included here) between 20-35 critiquing the same market they follow on Instagram, the brands whose content they repost for giveaways. We hate what we love, buy, consume, advertise freely. I fear, a little, we hate our own market susceptibility, the unshakeable and historically imbued quality of womanhood that is to Look The Part, to prove our in-groupness. Ex: our insidious search for The Row’s jelly shoes in early summer—are these the shoe? Are these the shoe this summer?—our wicked delight in their poor quality, the egg on the face of the women who Fell For It. Wouldn’t we have? If we, like our enemies, had the $890 to spare? Is that not why they’re our enemies?
This is, obviously, my New York, not New York in general. I’m 27 and swirling in this particular pool of ambition and sought pedigree, which for Zillenials (sorry for saying that) is basically: how to use the internet to make something of yourself, how to be a micro-celebrity for your creative ambitions. And, honestly, a little of New York in general which has always been: where is the scene, how do I insert myself into the scene without looking like I want to be in the scene and then never saying a single thing about the scene at all except to say how little I care about it, how little I fell for it. Hiding outsiderness in a superiority complex.
I’ve been thinking of how hard it is to love someone outside their element. How, for example, Miles must find it strange to see me exist in some place I don’t feel reflects me, and I, at the same time, won’t leave or admit to not loving. He must think, of course it reflects her. It’s where she’s lived and learns to keep living. It must be easy, I think, to love me while I’m shaking sand from a towel. It must be so awkward trying to when I’m sitting in a Zoom meeting about the uncertainty of FAFSA deadlines, or reposting an Instagram story.
My newsletters, I realize, are often the same in their tone and intention, which is: how long do we live for other people? How long do we live outside our element before we call it? Before we retreat back into the drawn boundaries of our own, unseen lives? How long til we get to the beach? Are we there yet?
The saying Find Your Beach is one I love immeasurably. It’s so funny to me, so real. My beach in New York, as I think about it all the time, is here in Chinatown early in the morning, my roommates eating their various stews in the late evening and gabbing endlessly. A latte and a rain walk. Prospect park in the dusk. That sort of thing. But god do I wish there were shells to pick up instead of flotsam Chick-Fil-A bags and crushed needles, human shit on the sidewalk; do I wish I could open the window and not hear the screaming of another domestic row on Fulton Street, and instead hear the assuring cry of seagulls that you’ve come to the right place, which is away from everything you were trying for.
NYC felt like that even before Insta. Love reading your blog; it reminds me of my misbegotten youth in the city. Also reminds me that I am still trying to get to a beach, too, and Lake Cheston isn't doing it for me.
This made my heart ache. As someone who recently traded in city life to live and work on my family's farm Upstate, I can say it was one of the most soul-enriching decisions I've ever made. Sure that "city" was Austin and not quite the formidable NYC, but it had become stifling, scene-y and congested, full of clout chasers, social climbers, and wannabe influencers.
I'll have to dedicate a full post to the move, but reading this made me feel compelled to say to anybody reading, you can ABSOLUTELY make the move. It is 100% your call to say, "I think I'm done here," and move on.
Trust me (and more importantly trust yourself), that no party, or show, or festival, or fancy new restaurant opening, or super duper exclusive event invite is going to bring you peace. Go find your beach.