my home now

as i walked to work today (still sick with a cold, but getting better, it seems, day by day; i'm still on the nightly nyquil plan.) i was thinking about moving, about starting a new life here in new york. specifically, i remembered what it was like to move to baltimore from depauw, to have left behind all of my college friends, everything i knew, even the midwest. and i find myself feeling very similar things now that i did then: a feeling of loneliness, i suppose, of displacement. in baltimore, i had a very strong, close-knit group of friends. well, until the last few months i was there and everyone had moved. in new york, though, i have just a few close friends and i haven't really found my niche. what i have to keep reminding myself, though, is that this is all still new; that this will eventually feel like home, just the way baltimore came to.

i remember talking to emily on the phone the fall i moved to baltimore, before i met any of the people that would become my closest friends. i'd stand there in the underground parking garage of 1010, the wretched highrise i lived in the first year i was in baltimore, talking to her for hours, because i was homesick, because there was really no one else to talk to. we talked about boys (i was going through a messy breakup), and about feeling a little like a stranger in a strange land, much the way that i still feel in new york.

it's only been two months here, after all. and, for only having been here two months, i've already settled in quite nicely. i'm slowly finding my place here. and, someday, astoria will feel like home; things will stop being completely new everywhere i turn. i'll have my favorite restaurants and my favorite bars and feel a sense of place and stasis just the way i did in baltimore.

when a coworker of mine got my cellphone number, he said, "what the hell area code is that?" "baltimore," i told him. "why don't you get a new yawk numba?" he asked (he's from long island, bless his heart.) "i don't know," i said. "well, ya need to. yuh not in baltimore anymoah. new yawk is yuh home now."

i know it is.