Let's Begin
No Expectations
Thank you for being here.
I have no idea what I’ll write, or how often I’ll send, but the fact that you’ve come along for the ride means so much to me.
Truly, thank you.
New York City
Acknowledging the passage of time is its own form of trauma.
This is something you are reminded of more and more with age.
Now you are 22, living in the back room of an apartment off Pico and Fairfax, reading Salinger and Salter and Didion. Listening to jazz. Writing shitty poetry.
Now you are 23, living in East Harlem. Working at a bookstore. Falling deep in love.
Now you are 25, overstaying your welcome on a friend’s couch outside San Francisco, attempting suicide when he leaves on a work trip.
Now you are 28, living in a Koreatown studio. Deciding this is what it means to be a writer. This is what it means to live the writing life.
Now you are 33, single again. Questioning if you turned down a wrong path somewhere along the way. Is this what it is? Is this all it becomes?
Now you are 36, visiting an apartment in Brooklyn wondering what your life would have been had you never left.
Now you are 36, you have freedom, confidence, wisdom. You have the time to travel and spend a month here or there. You can eat at all the restaurants you couldn’t afford back then. You can sit at bars and talk with strangers. You can be looked at on the street and not feel judged.
Now you are 36, you wonder if you came here to visit the grave of your youth.
Somewhere in the transition of recent memories into the past, the distances get wonky. The difference between 6 months, 2 years, and 15 years isn’t always as proportional as you’d think.
Now you are here, passing an apartment building in an Uber. When was it that you lived there? Has it been a decade or 7 lifetimes? Both are true.
Now you are here.
Now you are here.
Now you are here.
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New York is a place to visit, LA is a place to live.
This is what I tell myself on the ride home from LAX.
During the pandemic, I began to seriously question why I live in LA. Was that the grand mistake? But then I’d have moments of intense love for this place:
The moments when the pink-washed light of dusk settles over the city
The smell of jasmine blooms heralding summer
Watching from my window as thousands of crows gather on rooftops and powerlines for their nightly ritual
A day in Malibu, or Montecito, or the Mojave
The unexplainable magic of the 4th of July in LA
One day I’ll write a book about all this, I swear. I'll answer the questions. I'll put everything I think and know onto the page. My goals. My traumas. My politics. My heritage. The city of LA itself. The languages I speak. The words I am missing. What the pain of loneliness feels like. The world I wish I lived in. The weight of good ideas versus bad. The conversations in my head in the middle of the night. The color of the sky.
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Walking in Central Park, I come across a grove of sycamore trees in front of the Summer Stage. The trees are slender, straight, and tall. Their limbs fill out most of the trunk, which is a smooth, sandy white. These are American sycamores (platanus occidentalis). I've been learning how to identify American (or Eastern) sycamores from London planes (platanus × acerifolia) and both from the Western sycamores (platanus racemosa) I'm used to back home.
In Park Slope, I fall in love with the Japanese maples (acer palmatum) that turn delicious shades of color in November, and which are common in the small front gardens of brownstone. I even spot a few Sango-kaku (acer palmatum 'Sango-kaku') cultivars with their fiery bark. Along a playground off Underhill Avenue, I find a large Red Maple (acer rubrum) that is ablaze in scarlet, and which looks more fitting for a Dr. Seuss book than here in Prospect Heights.
I spend an afternoon at Princeton and discover the Japanese Pagoda (styphnolobium japonicum) after mistaking it for a honey locust (gleditsia triacanthos). I read that the two buttonwoods (American sycamores) in front of Maclean House are older than America itself—planted in 1766. Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t be born for another 43 years. I touch their trunks hoping they transfer something to me. Later, I get to the seven-story-tall American Basswood (tilia americana) in the courtyard of Mathey College. Its age is unknown, but it was already a mature tree by the early 1800s.
I've been keeping a mental catalog of tree names that could work as the names of children. My own name is the Hebrew word for pine (genus: pinus), my mother's name is Hebrew for palm (family: arecaceae), and my sister's is Hebrew for laurel (family: lauraceae). I was named for my great-uncle Lipa, whose name is the Russian word for linden (genus: tilia), and it's a tradition I want to keep alive. I have three names on my list, so far: Alder, Linden, and Ash. I considered Olive, but decided against it. I imagine a grove in the yard of my future home where the namesake tree of each of my children is planted. "Sorry, Monkey Puzzle (araucaria araucana), it's the only name we had left."
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It's my second to last day in New York. I'm walking with C. through Greenpoint to get croissants at a bakery on India Street. We pass the spot where a bar, Manhattan Inn, used to be. I point it out to her and tell her that it’s where I spent my last New Year's Eve living in the city—one of the worst nights of my life. My girlfriend at the time was being purposefully distant and stand-offish (I was moving across the country a few weeks later, leaving her behind). We went to the Manhattan Inn to ring in the new year, but she spent most of the evening with her friend away from me. I got tired of the games, and wanted to enjoy the time we still had together rather than waste it upset. This led to us bickering back at her apartment and I left, which landed like a bomb (see previous about moving, leaving). She followed me from her place to the subway, shouting at me the entire way for abandoning her, I shouting back that it was her abandoning me. When we got to the subway platform, she demanded that I come back to her apartment, called me an asshole for leaving her when I refused, then began punching me repeatedly as she cried. I stood with my hands by my side, not moving, and angled my face towards the security camera above—the only way I could think to record this moment for proof. Tired, heartbroken, sobbing, she left, at which point I broke down too. I cried the whole ride from Greenpoint to the Upper East Side. The train car on the G was empty, but another couple sat across from me on the E. I got off at 53rd and Lexington, then walked down 52nd to the dead-end overlooking the FDR. It was early dawn by now. I stood at the edge of the fence, my face still wet and puffy, and debated jumping down into traffic to end the pain.
I tell this all to C. and discuss writing new memories in Greenpoint, but the conversation quickly moves on.
Still, because I have talked about that memory for the first time in years, something shifts in me. I have a vivid dream that night. In it, I am dating someone new and we are hanging out with a group of friends. This former girlfriend from the Manhattan Inn is part of the group too. I find myself talking with her for a while but then feel my current girlfriend getting unhappy with it. So, I go back to her. Later, we are all sitting out on some wooden deck in a circle drinking beers. From my girlfriend’s chair we can see my old apartment in the distance. It has a distinct art-deco window in the shape of a nautilus shell. I point it out to her. As we talk, I can feel my ex staring at us, watching, jealous. I kiss my girlfriend and then I wake up.
It's a little after 3 am. My mind is racing.
Is this why I'm here? To say goodbye? To her. To my youth. To those 7 lifetimes that are still here carrying on as if I never left.
There was a toxicity to our relationship. You once said to me "there is something nefarious between us," and you were right. For years I held that inside, believing it was me. It was a poison that ate at me. Hollowed me. Changed and reshaped me. It was your lasting gift. I've spent years draining that poison out of me. Healing the tissue and finding myself again. Now I think that something nefarious wasn't between us, but inside of you. It wasn’t you, but something you were carrying. And it broke us. It created damage that we could never recover from. We tried. When we got back together a few years later, I wasn't the same. You weren't the same. Our chemistry was different. Our conversations less present. Duller.
There is a timeline where we never meet.
Another timeline where our first break-up is our only one—where nothing gets more complicated, more poisoned, more extreme.
There is also a timeline where we figure it out. Where we become what I always thought we could be. Where you’re the only person who has ever truly understood me.
There is a timeline where we are friends, too. Or at least still talk. Maybe it's a timeline in which we never get together, or one where we didn't self-destruct so completely. It’s a timeline where our shape together is different. I've never thought about this scenario until now.
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My final morning in New York. The days are getting quite cold. I'm beginning to miss people back home. I decide to grab my last bagel and lox of the trip and walk to Prospect Park to eat it. I spot the small pomme-like berries of a Strawberry tree (arbutus unedo) off the Garfield Place entrance. My phone app corrects me: it’s a Serviceberry (amelanchier canadensis). Behind me, a father is pushing his young daughter in a stroller while explaining to her what a fence does: "It keeps somethings in, and somethings out." Maybe her name is Ash, though Strawberry would be cute too.
• Recommendations •
Reading:
Smelling:
B683 by Marc-Antoine Barrois — has a warm, sophisticated, saffron scent
I Don’t Know What by D.S. & Durga — my absolute obsession. no real sample size is sold, so you have to smell it at a store or just buy a 4-pack sample. But it smells like physical intimacy. A weird description, I know, but an apt one.
Watching:
American Symphony on Netflix — an emotional documentary about art, love, the challenges of life, and survival.
Scavengers Reign on Max — One of the most unexpectedly fascinating and gripping series I’ve seen in years. It truly did something new that I’ve never seen before.
Listening:
Eating:
Claud in Manhattan
Bub & Grandma’s in Los Angeles