Dear friends,Ā
Thanks for reading our letters: for more than two years!
When we started Letters from Home & Away in the summer of 2020, we didnāt know much about what was ahead: for ourselves, our friends, or our neighbors.Ā What we *did* know was that we wanted to write down what we were experiencing, then share those thoughts with each other and with you. Getting to do so has been a privilege. Thanks again.
This letter (#50) will be the last youāll be receiving in the traditional LFHA format. The reason why is an exciting one. Outside of our day jobs, Ali and I are spending more and more time freelancing for publications around the internet and even working on book-length projects. Weād like to use this list as a way to share that published work with you and provide updates about those larger projects if (cross your fingers!) they come to fruition.Ā
Youāll be receiving links and updates from both of us: Sometimes together, sometimes individually. Weāre choosing to share a newsletter list because though writing is somewhat lonely by definition, we know that we create best inside of a community. Weāre seeking to model another way of being a writerācollaborative, mutually beneficialāin how we share and promote our work, and in how we put our ideas in conversation with each other.
To that end, weāll end (at least this chapter!) where we began, in New York City. We look forward to sharing lots more with you in the months ahead.
Kate & Ali
Dear Ali,
A few weeks ago, I was back in New York City for 36 hours between a family visit and a friendās wedding. Some people (many people!) live in New York for decades. Some people (many people!) spend their whole lives there. I spent just two years for graduate school, then another twenty months commuting in for work. If time were money, this would be coins in the bottom of a purse.
And yet, of course, I feel as much claim to the place as anyone else. As much a right to write things down and call them mine: All the pink in the spring, a bag of salt-and-pepper chips purchased in a Harlem train station, a particular sliver of Hudson seen through a bedroom window.
Back in Manhattan, there was much that I remembered how to do. I remembered how to take the subway: which speed to swipe the MetroCard at (slower than you think), which express train to take and which express train to skip. I remembered the seafood place with the great crab dip at happy hour. I remembered the smell of hot pee on the streets. (Fondly! That was a sign of summer.) I remembered the almond horn at the pastry shop. I remembered where the bathroom was located at the magazine where I worked, and the vinyl-covered bench I laid on to collect myself before a big print deadline. I was proud of all I remembered: that knowledge in me dormant but not disappeared, lying just underneath the surface.
Of course, things had changed. Some of my friends still live in New York, but many do not, and the ones that do live in different apartments, or have new jobs, or new relationships. We wonāt ever recreate our first time out in the city, slipping through a string of parties, taking a cab all the way back from Brooklyn because we didnāt know how to handle the subway. Remember your birthday, eating a frosted cake our friend made and carried through the streets of Harlem? Remember your baptism, in a bathtub?
As I took a cab out of the city to JFK, I expected to find myself longing for what had been. There was that midsummer light on the streets! The curve of the park. The crunch of the almond horn. Iām sentimental by nature. Iām used to missing things. Of course, Iād miss this.
And yet, my feelings were more complicated than pure nostalgia. I loved the city, but I didnāt wish I was back in the āold days.ā I could see the old days for what they were. They contained some of the same sorrows and troubles that followed me now. And some of the things that bothered me thenāa relentless commute, an ever-present homesicknessādidnāt afflict me anymore. That was good, I thought.
I wasnāt happy to be leaving, either. Just as weāre prone to idealize the past, weāre tempted to reject it. I love my new job. I love my new state. Never better. As a culture, weāre so relentlessly optimistic that it can be hard to acknowledge ambiguity and pain: that some things are better now, yes, and some things are worse.
The most that could be said of life is that it had moved forward. A neutral category. A miracle, in and of itself, considering where weād been.Ā
One of my last memories in the city before we left is of that trip to the movie theater to see Little Women. Do you remember? I took the train in to meet our group of friends on the Upper West Side. The snow fell in flakes the size of palms, and we slipped on its melt in the foray of the theater. All of us cried when Beth died. Afterwards we went and ate arancini at an Italian restaurant with checkered floors, and I went home via Grand Central, with its ceiling full of stars.Ā
This was the very neighborhood I sauntered around in for a day this July, also via Grand Central and its constellations. The weather was hot, not cold. I was wearing a new dress. Remote workers filled the coffee shops. I was two years older: and what a two years theyād been. I could hardly say anything was the same.
And yet, swiping my MetroCard slowly and placing my old order and leaning into the arms of a friend who said how are you and meant it, I was struck not by transience, but by resiliency: of places and relationships, if weāre lucky, and perhaps most centrally, who we are in the midst of both.
Everything changes, yes. Your favorite restaurant closes, and people you love get sick, and you meet new acquaintances, and ask new questions. Itās a clichĆ© that nothing last forever. Nothing stays the same. But I want to argue that many things do: perhaps, especially, the difficult things, the questions we carry that havenāt yet resolved themselves, and the insecurities that nag, and the jealousies that rage. Age will allow me to outgrow them, maybe. But maybe not. Same goes for the things Iāve loved, and always will: carrying them with me, itās cliche to say, in the visions I have when I look at a street and see the snowflakes, the arancini, women talking about a book they read as children that was adapted into a movie as adults. And things last not just in memories, but in who we are on a subconscious level, what concerns us and who we see ourselves to be, in our physical habits and our particular perspectives. The way we swipe a MetroCard.
The arc of history isnāt always toward progress, or resolution, or joy. At least, not yet. Perhaps it can be toward awe: How does it all hold together, still? Or acceptance. Or at least, an acknowledgment of how beautiful and grievous everything always will be, no matter our striving or avoidance, no matter where we live.
Not an idealization of what came before (ātimes were better thenā) nor a wholesale rejection (āgood riddance!ā)
More like: That was joy and pain. This is joy and pain, too. Iām still myself. Here I am.Ā
Thereās a comfort in that.
Love,
Kate
Weāre still recommending our friend Nikkiās novel The Measure. You can find it reviewed in the NY Times here.