We move to a new apartment on Beltane, which seems auspicious, but I don’t have it in me to honor the changing of the cycles, and I don’t actually know that much about Beltane. I have beeswax candles so I light them, which will do for any ritual. I feel bad that I don’t do more, like I’m missing an opportunity for sacredness. I don’t have it in me to mark the day because I am tired and also scared. I go to get snacks at the fancy deli nearby and I drop a water bottle on a bouquet of tulips which I then have to buy, because I’ve decapitated them. I try not to perceive this as a bad omen. Instead, I cut them down and put them in a smaller vase, maybe they just wanted to come home with me and that’s how they made themselves known. I unpack boxes, listen to the sounds of my new neighbor. Cortisol rising.
The neighbor’s name is Mr. Train.
Before we moved, I was more concerned with the lack of view from the bedroom. I am not sure how, but the train, the LIRR, was not a huge concern of mine, of ours. I had heard it when we viewed the apartment. It was brief and not all that intrusive. I guess we only heard it going in the quiet direction. I didn’t expect the noise to upset me as much as it did (does). This disruption has caused existential distress. The first day or so in the new apartment, I come to understand the word dysregulated anew. The presence of Mr. Train (as named by my beloved friend Chace, who encouraged me to engage him in conversation rather than talk about him behind his back, if you don’t know Chace, now you do a little bit) calls into question every choice I’ve ever made to get me to this moment. In this quite nice apartment, with this intrusion I can’t control. I question myself, my judgment. I am hard on myself for letting myself down, not taking the train more seriously, not knowing that we, me and my various selves and all their needs, are sensitive to noises. I rushed to settle. Rushed to find a new apartment.
Henry is not that bothered, by the way.
I ask my new human neighbors when I run into them, with only a slight pitch of panic in my voice, does the train noise bother you, too? To which the longest standing tenant says, he doesn’t notice it. Great, he must be a sociopath; I think. His girlfriend, who sleeps over often, says it doesn’t bother her either. There is hope, I guess, or extreme disassociation in my future. When I tell my mom that people are saying they think I’ll get used to it, she says, “like they do in prison.” Which is funny and also gets to a key part of what has been unnerving me. Even if I adjust, is it a good thing to acclimate to something that you find unpleasant?
I am nothing if not extremely tapped into my senses. Embarassingly human. Sensitive to sound, textures, light, tastes, energy. Ocean Vuong, in The Interview this week, in discussing his approach to his work as a way of life says that he characterizes it as “a kind of sincerity, of figuring this out. I think that’s it. A Buddhist sutra says to engage the phenomena of the world with earnestness.”[1] I would love to engage with the phenomena of the world with a little less earnestness and I’m only slightly joking.
The way this train rumble disrupted me - it is hard to articulate the physical experience. The tingling coursing from tip to toes. A total loss of a sense of humor, of perspective. I absolutely spiraled. My cat was my mirror. Famously bad at adjusting, he burrowed himself under the covers for the better part of a day. I wished I could do the same, but as an adult, that would be sort of embarrassing and there were boxes to unpack.
Every time I enter some significant newness in my life, there is fear. I forget this about myself, so leading up to it, I am not frightened. I am business, doing what needs to be done to get us to where we’re going. It’s when I’m finally in it, I stop, look around, and am terrified. What have I done? At these threshold moments, I worry that I’m going to lose myself. As though it could be that easy. It’s like my body walks out of its energy field and into a new physical space, and then it takes a few days, weeks, for the rest of my energetic particles to coalesce and steady themselves in their new location. They always reassemble, but there is a moment where the energy is dispersed. I haven’t arrived. It can feel as though I’m losing who I was, in that place where I was prior, which is true. Those sacred mornings with my arched window. But I don’t think it’s wise to hold so tightly. That is not how you expand yourself. The thing is, you are losing a part of yourself, but the question is more do I trust that what is coming next will be better, or that it just will be, and that’s enough. Continuance. It doesn’t need to be perceived as such a threat. I’m a bit sensitive, by the way. Could you tell?
It is so hard to change, to move away from the worlds we know, even if what we are moving to is something apparently similar. It doesn’t matter the outside circumstances; it is the internal experience. Change is tricky but is required of us and is inevitable. This disordering at this small scale, reminds me of why people are so scared of evolution. Why this country is currently imprisoned by the false promises of going back to a time that was once “great.” Why people are grasping at the fiction of a golden past rather than engaging with the work required to create their future. Change is so threatening. Even if the past was better, it is a worthless attempt at return. We can’t get back there. Can you believe that? We can never go back.
Little deaths. Over and over. Births, too.
We moved, from Manhattan to Brooklyn, but there are other shifts about, and also have you been keeping up with the news? In the midst of it all, I get a migraine, then a severe crick in my neck, and then another migraine, and also for five hours I felt like I need to pee all the time. Turns out, this is all one long migraine syndrome, says the internet. And I know there is a lot there for me to understand, there must be something that my body is trying to tell me, but maybe it’s just that we lifted a heavy sofa (that we love) and that catalyzed the pain. Or maybe I’m not communicating something that needs to come out of me, so my throat chakra is congested and coming out sideways. It is all of it, obviously.
My body has felt like one of those rubber band balls. Tangled and dense. There has been an energetic turbulence that has had to wash through me and is now starting to settle. Reorganize. Over the course of this de-stabilizing moment in time and over the course of this protracted migraine, one friend massaged me, another rubbed my feet. Another sent me home with her heating pad. Another brought me sacred dirt from New Mexico. We ate pizza. Drank wine. Had tea. I am so lucky. Women, to have each other. We are so lucky.
At some point during the past few days, I remember my capacity to affect the space around me. I was judging the new space before I gave myself to it. Before I hung the paintings, vacuumed the corners, unpacked the books. I had not given the space anything, yet I was expecting so much from it. Everything, really. Something that I am starting to understand, conceptually, is that life, really all of it, requires work. I had not worked the space, and I had not let it work on me. Spaces can be cold until you give yourself to them. It is a relationship. Henry has charged the kitchen with his self, every inch accounted for, utensils in their place. The cat has found his favorite places to lie, partial to splaying on the couch. It was just today, when I was making shitake mushroom and dulse broth for myself, that was when I started to feel settled, like we are living here. Then I cleaned the windows to let more light in. Now I’m writing to you and Henry is stuffing chickens with brown butter lemon zest brioche. I am arriving now.
The night before we move, I sit in the grass looking across the Hudson at New Jersey as the sun sets, watching shadows dance across waves of tulips. Witnessing and wondering if I will remember these little details that make up a life. I watch each new person become enthralled by the sea of tulips. Everyone takes a photo, rarely do they just gaze. One little girl, who gives off the energy of a fifty-year-old, quietly goes up and sniffs them, then silently grabs her mother’s hand. There is a woman in a burka who is using the wall of tulips like a step and repeat. Her husband is taking her photo. She lifts her veil to expose her smile. She also makes certain that her Louis Vuitton shoes are visible and lifts her cuff to expose her watch. I think about modesty.
On Saturday I spend time with a best friend at Sheep’s Meadow. On my way to her, I pass by two men, lying separately, both tanning in little orange speedos. Do they know about the other? That there is another man in a little orange speedo on this same lawn? What are the odds? I fall into my friend, who I haven’t seen since the summer. We jump right into our mutual crises of the past 24 hours. There is no better feeling than to not catch up, to be with each other in this moment.
Mr. Train brought up two deep fears. The first, that I let myself down. The second, that I would be embarrassed to have people over. Or that the sound would be too disrupting that friends or family wouldn’t want to sleep over in the second bedroom. And then what is the point of a home if you don’t want to share it with people?
Friends have come over. I better understand the phrase housewarming now. They have given their energy to it too. A little bit theirs as well. Many have said that the train sounds like a wave.
Chugga Chugga Choo Choo,
Gracie
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/magazine/ocean-vuong-interview.html This is a beautiful interview you should listen to.
Oh Gracie, I so hear you. I know how you feel. I once experienced the same. It came out ok
Love from Elly on Salt Spring.