Pretty fog, where's the nearest Starbucks?, compulsive Google Maps habits, writing interrupts my Love Island binge, I cry when puppies look at me

My first Substack post! Feel free to not read it :~)

Yesterday, sometime between 4am and 5am, I dropped my brother off at the nearest airport — which, as it turns out, is not so near — so he could catch an early flight. After five days spent together, spanning five different states, it was time for him to head home, and time for me to start reinventing the meaning of that word. Home.

[Some background: I just finished my MFA in fiction, have somehow (?!) landed a Fancy Creative Writing Fellowship (TM), and now, as of three days ago, live in a village named Hamilton with a population of 4,000. Welcome to my Substack.]

The drive back to Hamilton was startlingly beautiful, and, perhaps because it was such an odd time to be awake, I felt particularly open to receiving that beauty, as if I were moving through a dream, as if the world around me was an experience curated by my own consciousness. The sun was just beginning to rise over these vast expanses of farmland, the horizon and the sky meeting in this gorgeous, ecstatic shade of orange. What I will remember for a long time is the fog: how it formed these horizontal sheets in front of the windshield of my car, how it stretched over the land searchingly like the hand of a large ghost. I’ve never lived somewhere so rural. A test for rurality, perhaps, is searching for the nearest Starbucks on Google Maps. Nearly 40 minutes away from where I sit now (to be clear, the close proximity of a Starbucks is not something I require in the slightest). While we were roadtripping together, my brother drove my car every step of the way, so this solo drive back to Hamilton from Syracuse was the first time I came home to this apartment on my own, behind the wheel of my own car. Just a person in a new place, heavy with hope and heartache and a thousand emotions I’m too afraid to name.

Before the move, whenever I imagined leaving my brother at the airport and coming back to my new apartment alone, I imagined crying. I imagined that, when I was finally alone, I’d experience these giant waves of repressed emotion all at once. But as I drove away from my brother, whom I love and appreciate dearly, the repression continued. I felt little. Through fog and farmland, I tried to cry, imagining it would feel cathartic, but the tears that came were affected, and once I stopped trying, they stopped coming. I felt numb, clogged, and exhausted to the bone. I came home and promptly fell asleep, and when I woke up, I felt fine. Because I had manically unpacked every single box in one go without stopping the day prior, my apartment was actually in order. I could attempt to have a normal day doing normal things.

I made coffee and oatmeal and watched an episode of Love Island. I went to the cute cafe next door to have an Americano and scroll on my phone. With my Americano, I set off to the hardware store to buy extension cords. It was all very normal. I made it five minutes walking down the main strip of the village before I heard my name being called (is this what small towns are like?!). Hopping out of a Subaru on the street before me was my friend C, the only person I know in Hamilton, clad in overalls, her hair bouncing atop her head in a loose bun. As she enveloped me in a hug, she said, “Do you want to come over to my porch and have a beer with me?” Of course I said yes. A couple hours later, after an affirming gossip session and C’s many assurances that I would indeed make friends here, I walked home tipsy from a single beer, sent my friend E several crazed audio messages, took a shower, and watched more Love Island until midnight, perfectly content to be where I was, doing what I was doing. Me? Well-adjusted? Shocking! It can’t last.

Now that I don’t live there, I find myself looking at the map of Nashville every day. Just out of college, when I lived in New York City, I made a habit of starring every place I visited on Google Maps. It started as a way to learn the city — to map places I’d been, and their relative distances from one another. Now, it’s become a compulsive habit. Like, do I really need to star that random gas station in Kentucky I stopped at on the way to my friend’s engagement party? The answer is no. (But that gas station! I remember it! I peed in the first stall of the women’s bathroom! I bought a pack of sour gummy worms there, and I don’t want to forget a single thing in my life, not even a pack of candy and the cashier who sold it to me!) The result of this compulsion: bursts of yellow star icons on my map of every city I’ve lived in or visited since.

Nashville is certainly no different: if you’ve ever had me over to your place since the year 2017, chances are, I’ve starred it. Maybe even have labeled it (if I’ve visited more than once, I’ve almost definitely labeled it). It’s comforting to me to look over these marked places, the labels and stars. They are proof that I’ve moved through the world, that I’ve been invited into homes, that I’ve taken it upon myself to go places. To see things.

Now, when I look at that map of Nashville, I feel a strange pang in my throat. When I changed “Home” on Google Maps from my old address to my new one in Hamilton, I — god, so dramatic! — felt a real sense of loss. Between this address and that old one are nearly 900 miles, 13 hours on back roads and interstates, countless mangled piles of roadkill, and, as of last Tuesday, at least 10 God-related billboards. I’m so far away now from all those familiar labels and places. I’m so far away from any route I have memorized. What happens to all that information, the muscle memory of merge here, exit here, turn here? What happens to all that knowledge? Sometimes, at night, I imagine myself wandering the rooms of my childhood home, trying to remember the tiny details (I’ve actually adapted this self-soothing technique into a writing exercise for my students — they seem to like it). Or else I’m driving from that house to my high school, struggling to remember the names of the roads, the shapes of the mountains. Maybe now I will imagine myself driving from my old house in Nashville to my friend L’s, or D’s, or J’s. I don’t want to forget a single thing, which, naturally, makes living human life in the present tense rather difficult for me.

I was in the middle of a particularly juicy Love Island episode when I began thinking about writing this post — what words I would use and in what order. It’s been a long time since I felt that itch to write: the kind of urge that can worm itself into my mind so powerfully that even with the world’s most addictive television show blaring in front of me, I start to think of writing. Of what I want to say and how I should say it. I’ve learned (wow, so wise) that it’s important not to ignore these urges when they come, no matter how burnt out I am, and so I paused the show and opened up this Substack account, which I made last night at midnight on a whim, and began typing. I hope whoever reads this, assuming you even made it this far through my chaotic drivel, does not turn too critical an eye on the writing here. The real writing is in the fictional sphere, where I obsess over every word. But this here, I will try not to obsess over. This is just for fun. This is just because I’m lonely, and imagining you — a friend, or at least someone who vaguely knows me— reading this makes me feel less so. Loneliness can sometimes be a pleasant feeling, I think. It’s a feeling that pushes me to reach out to those people whose love I’ve already somehow earned, or to open myself to my surroundings and to all the love out in the world that’s waiting for me if I’m lucky. Loneliness makes me receptive. It’s when I’m lonely that I really look about myself. Which is to say (oh no, poet phrase alert!) that being lonely doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I need to remind myself of that.

While I was staying at D’s house last week, I took a walk through his neighborhood and spotted, in someone’s front yard, two stocky, floppy puppies who turned their heads, and then their entire bodies, towards me as I passed, watching me in unison. I felt like I could cry watching them watch me: the way they beamed their attention at and upon me, reminding me that I was really there, visible to other beings and worthy of acknowledgment. I remembered reading somewhere about cephalization: the localization of sensory and neural organs all to one region of the body, the head. The way we’re programmed to turn our heads towards a noise, a smell, an unfamiliar sight. It’s something we have in common with so many members of the animal kingdom, and I’ve always want to write about moments like this one, where I’m overcome with emotion at another being’s simple act of turning towards me and looking at me. The surprise I feel when I realize I’m perceivable. The way I can’t speak when someone says I’m beautiful. How could any of it be?

I catch all these moments and keep them. These small glances or long gazes are a form of touching me, and I remember the touches, too. An ex presses his lips against my neck at a pizza joint in Philadelphia years back and I remember it now as if it had just happened, that easy gesture, its resulting pleasant surprise. A boy around my age catches my eye for what feels like a long time around the year 2007 in the frozen food section of a Costco, gifting me the experience of being desired for the first time, and I still hold that feeling with me now. It’s all still with me, a part of me. About a month ago, a friend holds my hand under the table at a bar while live music plays in front of us, and I use that hand now, to type, to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, to push my glasses further up the bridge of my nose. I take that hand and lift it above my head, spread my fingers wide to stretch. It feels so good to stretch.