Before You Knew My Name (8)

If I can make it there …

You know how many songs there are about New York? When you live here, it’s like the streets serenade you. Remember when I said I would not squander my independence? If you knew what came before. Not even the stuff I told Noah, but the stuff before, and before, and before that. Well, you’d understand why it’s a place, not a person, I have given my heart to this time around.

I mean, can you imagine? That a place can feel like a person? That a place can comfort you and sing to you and surprise you. A place where simply stepping up out of the subway onto the street can give you that fizzing under the skin sensation you get right before you kiss someone? When I told Noah about this, when I said it was almost as if I had fallen in love with New York, he smiled funny, and called me Baby Joan, and I still don’t know what that means.

(Truthfully, he says lots of things I don’t understand.)

The point for now is this: I am happy. Whenever my worried feelings creep back in, I just head outside, no matter the hour, and I roam the streets and avenues and river paths until I shake the worry off. And this! Noah bought me a pair of sneakers. I came home from a long walk on Day Five, and there they were in a box on the bed, the price scratched off, so only the .97c part of the sticker remained. Purple, thick-soled, smelling of rubber and dye, and so much newness. It was like sliding my feet into the future. Into all the possibility ahead of me. That’s what I felt, and I may have cried a little, but I didn’t tell Noah that, or say thank you out loud, because I can already tell he wouldn’t like this kind of thing. I just wrote out an IOU from the post-it pad in the kitchen, sticking the word Sneakers on the refrigerator door, next to our ledger of days.

It is strange to think that only a week ago, everything I had was counting down to nothing, from my depleting cash, to the single roll of black and white film in my Leica, to my thin-soled shoes. My life was about subtraction and holding on to whatever was left over. Now the calculation has changed, life has spun me around, filled me up, and I am dizzy with happiness. I’m living in a stranger’s apartment, in a strange city, and thanks to both, I feel like I just might make it here. Noah with his ledger and his gift of new shoes, knowing without asking that all that walking around hurts my feet. And New York itself, baptising me with its spring rain, washing us both clean. This new, old city of mine, where if you look left, right, up, the view changes before your eyes. Of all the patterns, I already prefer the perfect lines the avenues make. The narrowing of distance to something you can see, understand. When I ventured further south yesterday, one street wound into another, right under my feet, with no warning at all, so that just a little veer to the left, and I was lost for the first time. I missed the certainty of my uptown avenues, the arms-wide openness of Columbus and Amsterdam, so I caught the 1 train home.

Home.

When I’m out there exploring, I see so many workers whizzing past me in their white sneakers and power suits. The quick legs and stiff arms of people in a hurry. I do not like the way they never stop and look around. They never look left, right, up, to see the city from a different angle.

Watching these people go by each day, I vow that when I get to their age, I will never wear a restrictive pencil skirt with sneakers. I will not stride along too fast for my surroundings. I will learn to walk slowly and gracefully in pretty high heels, or maybe stay comfortable in my sneakers, roaming the avenues, avoiding pencil skirts altogether.

These first seven days, I still think this is something I will get to decide.



Just a few streets over from Noah’s apartment, Ruby can barely get out of bed. It is as if the moment she stopped needing to be somewhere—work, brunch with her friends, her twice-weekly PT sessions—the weight of her sadness piled down on her, made her limbs and eyelids heavy. While I am traipsing around Manhattan, peering through my lens at the world, she remains stuck in her room, staring at the concrete ceiling, hour after hour sliding past her. From this prone position, she has had plenty of time to ponder her plight. Is this a midlife crisis come early? Extreme fatigue? Situational depression? Or is this simply what it feels like to be absent of hope, hollowed out?

You have to get to the worst thing, eventually.

Someone once told her that, a friend reasoning their way out of a run of bad luck. At the time they meant it as self-comfort, assuming there had to be a limit to their trials. Things could only get so bad before life turned around again. But now, blankets pulled up to her chin, the sounds of the Upper West Side clanging outside her window, Ruby wonders if she heard the sentence wrong. Maybe her friend was really saying you can only outrun your sadness for so long. It will catch up to you. Eventually. Back in Melbourne she had been living in a kind of emotional stasis, avoiding feeling sorry for herself by never really letting the reality of her situation sink in. Perhaps this was the worst thing. Pushing her feelings so far down they calcified, became an anchor. And now, with no place to be, no one to see, she has suddenly found herself unable to move.

And just what is that reality she’s been avoiding, the one keeping her in bed this whole first week in New York City, as winter turns to spring outside her window? Only this: the man she loves is going to marry someone else.

She knew this when she met Ash. Thought nothing of it. New co-worker at the ad agency, newly engaged, ho-hum, lots of people their age got married. It was only later, when Ruby knew the pressure of his hand on her hipbone, the weight of his lips on her shoulder, that this became the fact upon which her life turned. A wedding date was set, and her relationship to time changed. The future contained a marker, an end date, and somewhere along the way Ruby stopped making her own plans. She had an ever-decreasing amount of time to change Ash’s mind, to help him undo his impending mistake, and if that meant living exclusively in the present, being available to him whenever he asked, it would be worth it when he did change his mind.