Adorn your life in empty picture frames.

A note: I will revisit the vampire adventures of the last month in my next post.

Prologue: I should probably have noticed my friends were no longer in the room.

I had been traveling a while when I got home to find my plants were still alive, albeit dry along the windowsill. I had an odd and wonderful trip, the weird thing I found was that the further I got from anything familiar, the deeper into unfamiliar conversations I would get. Maybe the kind of odd duck I am goes over better across the Atlantic. Or maybe I found myself inspired. Deciphering accents, decoding a language different from the one you were decoding the day before (I’m still catching myself saying “merci” when anyone hands me anything), asking exceedingly confusing followups, learning something new with every meeting.

I had gotten so used to hearing the same ideas repeated to me back home that I got tipsy off a couple sentences when I didn’t know the lyrics with someone new at lunch. Not having to nod my head at a setup to a revelation you’ve been told 30 or 40 times before. Perspectives that had nothing to do with the US, perspectives that had nothing to do with the US’s perspectives on the US. Learning about the recent history of a given place, the connections between seemingly unconnected things, Roman History, Berber, Egyptian.

When I got home all of that was missing. There wasn’t even really anyone to tell about it. I found myself a bit morose, I don’t know if it was loneliness or finally realizing that most of the pieces I’d built of my life had shifted. I was talking to someone new about cooking for dates or even cooking for friends, and realized none of the friends I was talking about were around anymore. Relationships that ended, people move elsewhere, they fall in love, they have their hands full balancing their own new lives on a tray. I was feeling things I’d never felt and had no one to bounce those new things off of.

I have wrestled for years with the idea that maybe I’ve allowed New York City to be a kind of beautiful expensive cage for me, if being sure I couldn’t find anything better was keeping me from finding something new.

Realizing the other day that I was considering starting over, building a new circle around myself, I realized maybe this isn’t the place to do it anymore.

One of my favorite people just recently gave birth, and while the child and resulting family are beautiful, the process was harrowing and she almost didn’t make it to tell the story. Talking about that experience with her she said she still wonders how you balance being an individual with the new identity of a family. “It takes a village”, we both said. And it really takes a village to do anything, and I no longer have a village. I have a lot of people doing their own things that I occasionally cross into. I don’t know exactly what their lives look like when I’m not around, if they still have moments where they feel like they’re alone. But I know the overlap of all those conversations has faded. And suddenly a group that in my head was slowly shrinking had disappeared completely.

So this week I started thinking very honestly about where I might go if I needed to rebuild somewhere else, to find a new village that I trust, whose trust I earn, whose help I borrow from and give myself into. There are people I see sometimes where no matter how much time has passed since we spoke we always dive into the deep end. So I’m figuring out how to maybe dig my way out of this sorta ghost-life I’ve built for myself. All of the eras I can remember jammed into a closet I can’t get open anymore.

I shut down my instagram this week, at least for now. I have a new book to announce soon, and I’ll probably need it for that. But for now the link leads nowhere, the app is in the trash. Most of the time my phone is in the other room unless I need it. I’m writing a lot of things in an unreasonably chaotic way, but there are pieces I love and hopefully later I can string it all together. Like editing film, the glue painstaking and invisible.

I’m trying to put in the work to figure out some of my next steps. I’ve put out feelers for where I might be welcome, researching the terrain appropriate to what I’m thinking of. I’m starting to make my peace with the loss of all these fixtures I imagined were around me. Like losing your things in a fire, knowing they’re not coming back, treasuring the warped and inaccurate flicker of it you’ve lost in a pile of all the rest of your experiences. But on some level feeling the relief of no longer having to steel yourself against losing it all because you can’t lose it all twice.