To Alleviate My Seasonal Depression, I Moved South
Sunshine is abundant here…and so is racism
When I told my friends that I was leaving Rochester, NY the first time, they worried; the tenth time, they laughed; the hundredth time, they just barely rolled their eyes. The thing about Rochester residents? Everyone is always leaving. At least, that’s what they say in their Facebook posts.
But Rochester, a city in the Rust Belt of the Northeastern United States, is one “Hotel California” of a city. People plan on leaving. They visit other cities, go apartment hunting in other states, and apply for college as far from upstate New York as possible.
That’s why my friends stopped worrying about me leaving our shared city with the gravitational pull of a thousand suns. Everyone was always talking about moving away, but as long as they were talking, they weren’t going anywhere.
I wasn’t going anywhere.
But as I shoveled snow with half-frozen fingers, I dreamed of Atlanta. When my eyelashes froze in the bitter cold, the allure of Miami was almost too much to bear.
As a biracial daughter of a South Asian man and a half-Ashkenazi Jewish woman, I knew who I was because, from birth, other people told me. I knew that I had parents who didn’t look like each other. I was…
