I made it to Asheville today.
The air in the mountains is so damp my hair has turned into a curly mess. There are crickets and critters (Avery says tree frogs!) chirping outside. The lullaby of the valley. We live on Blue Ridge, and this mountain is called Beaucatcher. The round house looks down and into a green valley. It is literally a round house. There are fireflies and insects singing in the rain.

Transitions are the hardest part. Flying on a plane is the most convenient way to get from point A to point B, but I'm not sure that's always a good thing. Traveling is an interesting space, between departure and arrive, and that space, to me, is an acclamation time. I often feel that there is great value in lugging your suitcases, leaving one place bound for another and in turn sacrificing a day to the Gods of journey-making. But planes can move too quickly. You could be in New York at 9 am clinging to your best friends shoulders and two hours later be in a completely new world. I feel as if I should have been on a plane for hours and hours- just to feel as if I was really going somewhere. I said goodbye to Harlem this morning and said goodbye to the best friends I've ever had. This goodbye, like many others, means that the routines of one life transform. I am here and welcome the change, but the goodbyes I've said are lingering in my body: I will miss my Harlem routines, and I will miss the routines that linked me to my friends on a daily basis.

Transition is the time it takes for the mind to catch up with the body.

A weekend of goodbyes. A long Monday.

Today was my last day at Folio. The summer is nearly over and it wasn’t till this afternoon, when I said goodbye to my co-workers and lingered around the corner outside of the office in Midtown, that I realized how quickly the time passed. I said goodbye to the people I’ve been working with for the past three months.

I read and edited a proposal on sexual selection, and then turned to the all-reliable slush pile. Did you know that the porn industry makes more in revenue than all of Hollywood? At five o’clock I found myself lingering… standing slowly, looking at the books on the selves… not wanting it to be over. My first day at the office, on the 1st on June, I filed contracts for three hours, and in the process asked about four dozen questions. That was the last time I filed anything.

As I stood around in front of Penn Station, I thought about how many moves I’ve made. All my life I have been traveling, packing up for a year or two, packing up for an adventure. You’d think that it would get easier with time— that, like anything, practice makes perfect. I’m good at packing up; I’m good at cutting down on unnecessary clothing and material stuff in my life. But goodbyes are another story. I lingered in the concrete park outside of the train station for half an hour watching midtown in rush hour.

I finally called a friend and we decided to meet downtown— we both needed a walk. Together we wandered aimlessly around the city— walked hard to move through the streets, to move through the day.

Leaving is a complicated feeling. Leaving is counting all the moments, faces, and people you treasure. Leaving is the chance to slow down and appreciate what is here, what is now. I have a complicated relationship with New York— a mixture of love and loneliness, a sense of overwhelming strength and independence matched by complete doubt. What if and what if and what if…
Leaving is a way to see who in my life will stay and who will fade away. Who will find me when I’m not a train ride uptown? Who will I find? The relationships I’ve made in the office, no matter how meaningful, are, in many ways, circumstantial. There are some people and relationships that will grow pale because of distance. There are some relationships that will end because of a move.

Leaving is slowing down, watching the rush hour; leaving is sitting on the fire escape with my friends, looking at the full moon over the Harlem Hospital and the 24 hour McDonald’s. Leaving it holding them close, leaving is watching time slip by.

I saw a man asleep in the subway at 42nd street. He was passed out with his head leaning against an elevator shaft and his legs splayed out in front of him in the shape of a Y. His shirt was folded and his stomach was exposed. His shoes were off and resting beside his head. Two cops stood over him. They marched around him in semi circles and prodded at his sides with their long black sticks. One of the cops reached into the man’s pocket and pulled out his wallet. They fingered through his identification and wrote him a ticket. They shoved the violation in his pocket. My train pulled in and the cops were still circling, sweating, and poking the man on the ground. They lifted him up as the doors to the 3 train shut and pulled me forward. I’m glad my train arrived when it did. I don’t think I could have managed to watch anymore.

It was a long day, but I have nothing but blessings to count.

A poetry teacher of mine at Sarah Lawrence told me that living in New York is like cave dwelling. After spending almost all day inside, I finally understand what she meant. You run out to get something, to pick up a paper, go to the gym, buy some ice cream, and run back to the cave where it is quite, where you can build a fire and cook your dinner. It rained all day today for the third day in a row.
Cave dwelling in Harlem: rushing past a group of guys wearing hoddies as they throw dice onto the steps for wrinkled dollar bills, past the wing and waffle shop, past bodegas selling the same brands of mango juice, past old men listening to music from a beat up boom box outside of Londell’s— and then home. Home to build a fire and cook Annie’s Mac and Cheese, home to watch more rain roll in.

To say I did one productive thing today, I applied for a job as a freelance writer for a local magazine in Asheville. Before sending out my job application, I rewrote my cover letter and updated my resume. At the bottom of my resume I have a line that reads “Interests”, which the counselor at career services strongly recommended. Today one of my interests changed from “getting lost in New York City” to “exploring Blue Ridge Mountain”. A few words that change everything: from being hopelessly lost in a grid system to being hopelessly lost on the mountain where I’m about to more.

It’s strange how we adapt and change, how we grow accustomed to our surroundings and feel comfortable in places we never knew we could. When I first moved here I was absolutely terrified. I got off of a plane form Maine, where I was visiting family, and, pulling my suitcase up Frederic Douglas Avenue, thought I had made an awful mistake. I wanted to turn around and go back. That night it was so loud I couldn’t sleep and every sound made me jump. But now, months later, I feel at home here. The men hanging out on the corners are familiar faces; I look forward to barbequed meat and cornbread on Adam Clayton Powell on the weekends. Slowly, this neighborhood has become home. Slowly, this apartment has become my cave. And just and I’ve learned to think in East and West, Uptown and Downtown, I am leaving.

Interest: learning to find my way.

At my internship I spend the majority of the day reading manuscripts. The formula goes as such: Query Letter, Synopsis, and the first chapter. The material itself is always different, and yet, after five hours of reading ‘slush’ they all seem to blend together— the chess champion falls in love with the archangel who is going to seduce the Scotsman who lives alone on a lake, and slowly, ever so slowly, the meaning of friendship and true love is defined. But honestly, the best part about this job is the reading. Whether or not a given manuscript is picked up for representation, I find an endless amount of inspiration from the people— the day-job working people— who make the time to sit down and write their story. We receive dozens of manuscripts a day; if they can do it I can too.


I realize that this is my third blog entry and I have failed to provide a Query Letter, a Synopsis, or any basic information surrounding my situation and the transition I’m about to make. The premise, as best as I can piece together, is this:

I am in entering a new stage in my life, where September no longer means signing up for classes, where student loans appear for the first time, where the reality of a 9-5 job sets in. But I want something first, I want stolen years. Years spent writing, spent believing in my work as much as anything else. Years to be young: to be in love.
The countdown begins, and after three months living in Harlem New York I have nine days to go before moving to Asheville North Carolina.

And the journey— the stolen years— begin.

Joan Didion in her novel “A Year of Magical Thinking” wrote that having a notebook on hand made the difference between writing and not writing. The difference between keeping an idea and losing an idea.

I have spent two days away from my apartment and I feel as if I’ve been gone a year.

At three in the morning I found myself in Crown Heights Brooklyn lying on my best friend’s boyfriend’s couch. As I fell asleep I became overwhelmed with the thought that I am losing ideas. The thought grew into an irrational fear as I recited three lines in my head, as I wrote them in my imagination, as I wrote them on the walls:

Remember heavy metal chairs, small French menus, a rooftop.
Remember the smell of cloves, garlic, mussels, cologne.
Remember your friends.

I woke up tangled in sheets, my body wedged into the crease of the couch, reciting my three sentences. But the last line was all I really cared about.
These people, my dear friends, are stronger than ideas: they will not let themselves be lost. Words or empty pages, there are some things that will never disappear. Aiyanna, remember that.

Day One

It’s been three months since I graduated from college and I’ve been struggling to find the time and space to write. In June, when I first moved to the city, I tried to force myself to write on the subway. But, as I soon discovered, writing on the subway is nearly impossible: constant motion leaves my handwriting childlike and illegible, I’m lucky if I get a seat, I’m terribly susceptible to distraction, and, despite all code of New York City conduct, I can’t help but watch the people around me. I would have missed far too much if I had forced myself to focus on a blank piece of paper.
The little girl who painted pictures on the windows with her purple bubble gum.
The young man who stepped into the car and, “Instead or robbing and steal” was out here “candy dealing.”
A young couple a they watched their baby.
A woman who must have been my age sucking her thumb.
It’s amazing how alone we become on the subway. How a public space can create such an unexpected sense of isolation. How comfortable we become. Maybe it’s because we know we’ll never see any of the people around us again.

And so I want to begin. I want to start writing again, at least a little everyday.
August 17th. Maybe this will help.