Note: I wrote most of this on my Blackberry while walking home from work. Related note: what on earth is wrong with me?
I hate that jewelry companies have co-opted the word “timeless.” There are certain moments in my life that I’d like to call timeless, but I don’t mean “lasting forever” or “a sparkly way to tell her she means the world to you.” I mean that they have achieved exemption from the space-time continuum. These moments have allowed me to become unstuck. They’re not lasting (or fleeting, really) but they completely transcend the mathematical ways in which we measure experiences. They are moments, not minutes, if that makes sense.
I have been lucky enough to escape the bounds of time a handful of instances in my life. The instance I want to tell you about now happened last month. It was March, and though it was blustery in New York, it was springtime on the West Coast. I was driving across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco back to the East Bay, admiring the vast stretches of open space, the flat white roofs of buildings atop hills, the monstrous mechanical oil arms dipping into the sea. It was warm and we had the windows down, and I appreciated the weather in the way only an East Coaster can: back home that week it snowed, but out West my shoulders collected freckles from the sun.
“Colors and the Kids” by Cat Power was blasting from the speakers and that part came on where she belts, “I could stay here, become someone different/ I could stay here, become someone better.” It was then that the word “timeless” struck me, though I suppose I wouldn’t put it in those exact terms until later. There are other words that come to mind: defining, crystallized, revelatory. As Cat Power’s wail climaxed it hit me: I am going to move to San Francisco. I didn’t have a job yet and I didn’t have an apartment yet and every logical neuron in my body was screaming at me to stay in New York, but it was then that I just knew–something broke in me and I knew–that the next time I came back to San Francisco I wouldn’t leave again for a very long time.
Reactions to the fact that I’m moving to San Francisco have ranged from, “Wow, you are so brave,” to “Damn you’re crazy,” to “Meh.” My own feelings about it probably sit somewhere equidistant between those three. Someone I trust tried to strike a further existential crisis in me: “So you’re going to San Francisco,” he said, “but have you even thought about the fact that you’re leaving New York?”
The act of going somewhere and the act of leaving are two very different experiences, but one can’t exist without the other. To go somewhere suggests a propelling forward, an addition to a landscape, whereas leaving creates negative space. I will live in San Francisco, but in New York there will be a Jessica-shaped hole. At least it makes me feel better to think of it that way.
I have spent so much time picturing what it will be like to live in San Francisco that I have almost forgotten to picture what it will be like to not live in New York. Last week as I was walking home from work I was listening to “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood” by St. Vincent. I always take the same route, the one that allows me to avoid the grime of the city most. I walk down Lexington until it dead ends at Gramercy Park, and then I walk past Stuyvesant Square and I think about what it would be like to get married in that big, red Episcopalian church. The area is nestled between two of the busiest avenues in Manhattan–2nd and 3rd–but with the park on one side and the church on the other you can barely hear the traffic.
In the shadow of the church it is easy to become unstuck–to forget that you are a person with a name, with a birth date, with an expiration date. I sat on the bench in Stuyvesant Square and watched the setting sun alight the church in different angles, and I saw planes from JFK skimming the sky above, and there was a homeless man on the bench next to me nursing a fifth of gin. I put that St. Vincent song on repeat (“Just like an amnesiac/ I’m trying to get my senses back”) and thought about that time I drove across the Bay Bridge and my heart swelled with the possibility of becoming someone better.
I sat there until the pollen from the trees began to make red hives stretch across my chest. I sneezed three times, and then I walked home.
I like this.