Arms Out Wide
Anyone who has loved me knows:
I want both everything and nothing.
Anyone who has seen me knows:
I feel both clear and blurry.
Anyone who has slept beside me knows:
I want to both go forward and stay in the same place.
What no one knows: I have found moments where I can be all of those things at once.
When we first moved to New York, none of us knew where to walk. Fifty girls crammed into a thin long corridor, two buildings that had been jammed together like two siblings who are forced to share a room and so they draw a line down the middle, this side is my side and that side is your side, and don’t you dare cross the line or I’m going to tell mom. One of the buildings was well-heated and newer — the golden child — while the other was a poorly-temperature-controlled one, usually freezing with disappointment.
In the summer, we escaped from our hallway into the sweat of Central Park. Ten girls, dipping our toes into the waters of womanhood, trying to pretend like we knew what we were doing when we transferred between the 1 Train and the 3 Train, running between platforms from this track to the next only to sit underground wondering whether we were on an uptown-bound track or not. Between classes, between seasons, between flights and buses back to our hometowns for Thanksgiving and Election Day, we crawled out from under our textbooks, crept out of our lofted beds and wandered through SoHo, admiring all the bejeweled things that our eighteen year-old selves couldn’t quite imagine ever affording, much less owning.
When fall gave way to winter, our entire hallway insulated itself in final exams, term papers, and cheap vodka hidden away at the back of the freezers of our mini-fridges. The city seemed too cold, too harsh, too wet with all the flakes falling down onto the tops of our heads and the snow slushing up against our feet and into our rubber boots.
Everyone swaddled themselves inside. Everyone but me.
Winter in New York was made for spinning, skipping, swirling. Make like the snow and whirl around on the sidewalks. Spread your limbs wide open and try to scoop up the bitter air into your palms, feel the sting of the so-cold-way-below-zero-god-it-is-so-fucking-freezing wind tunnels that make you wonder if they’re trying to knock you down, or pushing you to lift yourself up.
I was eighteen and had never taken flight before. I reached my arms out wide and tried to take up the entire street and felt so small and so big, both at the same time.
The streets were empty. The sidewalks were mine. Mine to walk, run, fly across. And what a thing it is to look around you and see a city that everyone says is meant to hold millions feel, even just for a moment, as though it is actually a city that is meant to hold only one.
When I turned twenty, I formulated a self-decree: I would never fall in love in the winter.
Heartbreak tastes best in the summer at the beach or with salt water in your hair. Broken hearts get stuck like the sand that wedges itself between your toes when you take your flip flops off at the boardwalk and trot down to the seaside. In the summer, like the sand, heartbreak is so much easier to wash out — to scrub away.
I was twenty and afraid of ruining the snow and sidewalks with the memory of something/someone/some heart that might beat deep down inside of me. What if the memory of all the things that went so horribly wrong weighed me down, and what if I couldn’t bear to lift myself out of my bed? Even worse: what if I couldn’t spin, twirl, fall down like the early morning snow? Or if I couldn’t spread my arms out wide and feel the entire city in my embrace?
While everyone else was tucked into their beds with hot cocoa and the promise of three new episodes of 30 Rock awaiting them, I had tasted freedom, found her waiting for me on the corner of 114th and Broadway, felt her in the snow that fell down from the greenish-grey sky, sensed her when I spread my arms out wide the way that you see toddlers run down the street in Park Slope: as though they have no idea that they are running down a concrete sidewalk because, in their mind, they are in a field of wildflowers, and what a feeling it is to brush up against soft petals, like feathers on your fingertips, as you run through a meadow in the sunshine.
Anyone who has walked by my side in December knows:
I won’t give up the feeling of freedom for anyone.
Our corridor dispersed: Boston, Brooklyn, Bombay, and beyond.
When we all moved out of New York, we left some things behind. No space for a mini-fridge in a SUV, no room for pages and pages of notes on novels that we’ll never read again.
And yet we took some things with us, too. Things like knowing all the stops on the 1, 2, 3 backwards and forwards (uptown and downtown). Or being able to recite the avenues from Riverside to Central Park West like lines out of a song. The way that we had memorized all the operating hours of Nussbaum & Wu, as though they were the formulas for our spring semester math exams.
And me? I walked through four new cities, some with narrow sidewalks, some with wide ones, over bridges and under flyovers, mostly in places where there was no snow to be seen, no bitter wind to be felt. But sometimes, I would walk around at dark or at dawn, when no one else was to be seen and felt, once again, that moment: with my arms out wide, and an entire city to myself.
