Last weekend, I was in NYC, visiting my dear friend Ashley. We took the train in from Long Island--where she lives--got of the Subway at Columbus Circle (Central Park South) and started walking away from the trees and into the endless maze of behemoth buildings--glistening castles of steel, marble and glass--when it happened.
The ache began.
It started, as it always does, deep in my chest. It caused me to stop for a second, to catch my breath and then to walk faster, my head held high, boot heels clicking powerfully on the pavement as though, if I pounded hard enough or walked fast enough I could escape my life.
I know this ache well. It startled me once in Paris, more than once in DC and now it found me again, it New York. Every time it happens, it calls me home. The ache pulses like a radar blip at the start and becomes more and more frenetic as my desire for a place--and the chance to run away from my life--grows. While in New York, my heart was racing, my eyes wide and happy, face aglow. I was free. And now that I am back in Indiana, doing everything in my power to avoid my lesson plans, the ache is pulsing again, incessantly, like a wound that can't be salved and a want that cannot be satiated. The ache calls me back to the city, to a life I have tasted but not yet discovered, to a piece of myself that is eagerly lying in wait to be found.
I have got to get out of here.
The problem with this ache, more than its incessant throb is the veil of disenchantment that it casts on my life. Sitting here, I am like Alice, having seen the other side of the Looking Glass; I've glimpsed at the possibility of imagination and been swiftly, violently returned to the reality of life: a needy kitty, a book to read and not enough time for tea.
I tell myself to snap out of it, to dive into work, but slowly I am pulled away--I spent the afternoon NOT grading papers but instead researching Grad schools, nursing my ache for freedom and carefully, cautiously furthering a dream. I have to let go at night, let my self drift back to the street corner where the ache began, let my Internet research take me to places where it might be soothed. Because by day, I have to harden myself to it, to fill my minutes and hours with the delicious distraction of work. I have to be happy in the here and now and not long for the places I've left or can't get to . I have to know that it will come, that I will escape in due time.
Alas, that knowing doesn't soothe the ache for New York, DC or Paris.
Someday is never close enough to today or to tomorrow.
I have books to read, a needy kitty and no time to write.
