Well, right now I’m in Philadelphia (where I’m moving for an amazingattorney position) and I’m sitting in my best friend of eight years’ place, after we saw an apartment, got ice cream, made dinner, talked about—everything, so many things, all of them meaningful or lighthearted, and important to me or her or both of us.
So I’m pretty good.
It’s funny you ask me this question, though, because it’s something I’ve been struggling with a lot in the last couple years. (The state of the world being what it is.) And what it comes down to, for me, is a question of framing. No one questions there are bad things happening in the world, if your optimism is founded on bad things not happening, then you’re going to be largely disappointed.
But bad things don’t happen in a vacuum. We aren’t living in an amoral universe, or if we are, humans ascribe a hell of a lot of morality to it—to the point where bad things happen, and people are offended by it. People get angry. Then they get angrier. People want answers to why the bad thing happened, and how to stop the bad thing; some people even give up their relative comfort and dedicate their lives to stopping the bad thing, or risk violence and death and arrestto stop the bad thing; after the dust has cleared, they question whether, now that we’ve theoretically stopped the thing, was that sufficient? Were we really addressing the bad thing, or are there other things we should be doing instead, to stop that bad thing more completely and effectively?
In these days and times I cling, so strongly, to the fact that I am not alone in my anger and confusion. No one is. There are people standing alongside me who are even more angry, more disappointed; that I share a world with the angriest people you could find. I’m such a mild optimist, I get disappointed and depressed when I find out the world doesn’t obey my rules. When people let me down, when we aren’t our best or even our mediocre, I just have feelings.
Some people have riots.
I take incredible heart in that. However bad the world gets, people are there, ahead of and with me, and they’re fucking pissed. The universe can never be truly amoral. because there are those people, and I can trot after them, believing in goodness and truth and love because there’s also this profound and complete anger. It races ahead, a product of fury, faith and conviction. (It’s hard to communicate to the more comfortable people in my life, but it exists, and endures, and anger that demands an answer. Jesus had a whip of cords, modernity has more weapons at its disposal.)
And then, at the end of the day, I spent a couple hours sitting outside a park, watching a bunch of kids between 7 and 12 play one of those inexplicable circle games—I watched them for an hour and genuinely could not tell you the rules. But the sun was weakly out, and there was green grass, and children of various colors bouncing a blue ball on the concrete. I wasn’t hungry, and I wasn’t anything, and sitting there, I thought—jesus, I am so profoundly lucky. To be sitting here, content in my safety, warm in the sun, watching this. Children, also safe, playing a stupid game I don’t understand except they’re standing in a circle with a blue ball and playing it.
The universe doesn’t guarantee our safety and happiness. Even other people don’t guarantee our safety and happiness, and they actually have an active will that could make a promise like that. But despite that, safety and happiness exist.
Terrible things happen, and despite that, good things happen too. You can either focus on the former, or the latter.
So I’ve written before about how to lose yourself in activities, how to make friends, how to get out of the four walls of your apartment (which will drive you mad, if you don’t) and experience your new city on its own terms. So I won’t talk about that.
Instead, I’m going to talk about the invariable, unmovable, awful terror. And how you will survive it.
Because it is unmoveable, at least at first. There is….a certain measure of terror inherent in moving to a new place and right then, you can’t do anything about that except feel it. You can distract yourself from it, with long walks and fun meetups, mixers, and various other assorted activities. You can drink (I do not advise this, it’s not a good long-term strategy) or engage in risky sexual behaviors (ditto) or neither and see a therapist instead (yes, please). You can throw yourself into work, you can get a dog (something I’ve seen members of my cohort do) you can choose to hone one of your hobbies. There are a lot of distractions, the world is full of them.
But at the end of the day, you will lie in bed in a strange place, and the terror will be there for you. Waiting.
I’m personally convinced it’s because your brain thinks you’re dying.
After all, a tomorrow that doesn’t look exactly like today, or at least reasonably similar, translates as a terrifying and uncertain blankness. It’s an abyss. It may as well be death. The human brain—an extremely stupid organ, built to identify poisonous berries and remind us to run away from things with teeth—thinks you are stepping off the edge of the world.
The terror is limitless, and senseless, in that it feel endless and engulfing, and will not listen to sense. It doesn’t matter how many times you reassure yourself that this will pass. It doesn’t matter that you know—know, with a certainty born of experience—that the terror will slide, slowly, into familiarity and routine. There will be a morning when you wake up, and cannot imagine a time when your dresser wasn’t exactly there, when you didn’t take that route to work in the morning, or know exactly where to go for lunch. The blankness will give way, inscribed by all the great and small details of a new place, and you will be fine.
The terror doesn’t care. The terror is convinced that this time, this time, you will not be fine. This time, you are definitely going to die.
(Depending on how you define it, I have moved somewhere between five and nine times, and lived in over four states. It’s mostly a lopsided triangle through the Midwest: Illinois to Michigan, Michigan to Kentucky, Kentucky to Illinois. A brief couple months in Boston for an internship, then back to Illinois. The longest I ever stayed put was in Chicago: an astonishing eight years and six different addresses. A couple months in Kentucky, then on to Philadelphia, a city I’d seen for the first time when I was brought in for an interview.
I was terrified, each and every time.)
The terror doesn’t care about ambition or your wanderlust or your fancy, logical reasoning. The terror doesn’t care if you have done this five times or nine times; if you know it will be fine, if you have controlled for every variable, if you are an expert. You can stare at maps and take notes and get excited while making new and wonderful plans; you can breathe, in and out and in again. But the terror is a senseless animal, and it cannot picture tomorrow.
The terror says: you are stepping off the edge of the world. You are dying.
Unfortunately, the only way to prove it wrong is to point yourself in that direction and walk.
I will say the distraction helps. My transition to Philadelphia has been smoother, in many ways, because now I know to search “things to do + philly + this weekend” and get out of my apartment; I take long walks, I’ve picked up photography. What used to take me a year has taken me two months simply because I’ve pushed myself to get out into the city and not be afraid. I go into restaurants and bars alone; I visit museums. I ruthlessly, shamelessly, force myself to enjoy my life here, in this specific place.
Of course the terror is still there, and it sneaks up on me sometimes, but it doesn’t have to own me. And that—if anything—would be my advice. You’re going to have feelings, they’ll be messy and ugly and paralyzing but the only way out is through. Get on the plane, get off it again. Point yourself in that direction, and keep on walking.
The point is not to win. The point is to do the right thing. The point is to try and maybe we win. The point is that not trying is guaranteed failure.
The point is doing our best to make the world better for ourselves. It’s not about victory, it’s about effort.
So you take a breath, you grieve your losses, and you don’t give up. Because we’re all in this together and the very least we can do for the least among us is to say we tried.
Real failure is when they convince you to give up.
it’s all you americans talk about… liminal space this… cryptid that
america is big, we got.,.,.,. its a lot happening here
It’s at least 3,000 miles just from the East Coast to the West, depending on where you start.
If I try to drive from here in Maine to New Mexico, it’s 2,400 miles.
From here to Oregon, 800 miles from my current residence to my relatives in NJ, then another 3,000 miles after that.
A brisk 8 day drive that meanders through mountains, forests, corn fields, dry, flat, empty plains, more mountains, and then a temperate rain forest in Oregon.
The land has some seriously creepy stuff, even just right outside our doors.
There is often barking sounds on the other side of our back door.
At 3 am.
When no one would let their dog out.
It’s a consensus not to even look out the fucking windows at night.
Especially during the winter months.
Nothing chills your heart faster than sitting in front of a window and hearing footsteps breaking through the snow behind you, only to look and not see anything.
I live in a tiny town whose distance from larger cities ranges from 30 miles, to 70 miles. What is in between?
Giant stretches of forests, swamps, pockets of civilization, more trees, farms, wildlife, and winding roads. All of which gives the feeling of nature merely tolerating humans, and that we are one frost heave away from our houses being destroyed, one stretch of undergrowth away from our roads being pulled back into the earth.
And almost every night, we have to convince ourselves that the popping, echoing gunshot sounds are really fireworks, because we have no idea what they might be shooting at.
There’s a reason Stephen King sets almost all his stories in Maine.
New Mexico, stuck under Colorado, next to Texas, and uncomfortably close to Arizona. I grew up there. The air is so dry your skin splits and doesn’t bleed. Coyotes sing at night. It starts off in the distance, but the response comes from all around. The sky, my gods, the sky. In the day it is vast and unfeeling. At night the stars show how little you truly are.
This is the gentle stuff. I’m not going to talk about the whispered tales from those that live on, or close, to the reservations. I’m not going to go on about the years of drought, or how the ground gives way once the rain falls. The frost in the winter stays in the shadows, you can see the line where the sun stops. It will stay there until spring. People don’t tell you about the elevation, or how thin the air truly is. The stretches of empty road with only husks of houses to dot the side of the horizon. There’s no one around for miles except those three houses. How do they live out here? The closest town is half an hour away and it’s just a gas station with a laundry attached.
No one wants to be there. They’re just stuck. It has a talent for pulling people back to it. I’ve been across the country for years, but part of me is still there. The few that do get out don’t return. A visit to family turns into an extended stay. Car troubles, a missed flight, and then suddenly there’s a health scare. Can’t leave Aunt/Uncle/Grandparent alone in their time of need. It’s got you.
Roswell is a joke. A failed National Inquirer article slapped with bumperstickers and half-assed tourist junk. The places that really run that chill down the spine are in the spaces between the sprawling mesas and hidden arroyos. Stand at the top of the Carlsbad Caverns trail. Look a mile down into the darkness. Don’t step off the path. just don’t.
The Land of Entrapment
here in minnesota we’re making jokes about how bad is the limescale in your sink
pretending we don’t know we’re sitting on top of limestone caverns filled with icy water
pretending we don’t suspect something lives down there
dammit jesse now I want to read about the things that live down there
meanwhile in maryland the summer is killing-hot, the air made of wet flannel, white heat-haze glazing the horizon, and the endless cicadas shrilling in every single tree sound like a vast engine revving and falling off, revving and falling off, slow and repeated, and everything is so green, lush poison-green, and you could swear you can hear the things growing, hear the fibrous creak and swell of tendrils flexing
and sometimes in the old places, the oldest places, where the salt-odor of woodsmoke and tobacco never quite go away, there is unexplained music in the night, and you should not try to find out where it’s coming from.
The intense and permanent haunting of a land upon which countess horrors have been visited, and that is too large and wild for us to really comprehend is probably the most intense and universal American feeling.
here in minnesota
We’re fucking what now
hi, may i introduce you to florida. our entire state mostly sits atop an aquifer made of porous limestone. the ground likes to open at times unknown and unwanted to swallow roads. cars. houses. entire car dealerships. it’s unpreventable. south of jacksonville, you pretend that the ground is solid.
walt disney, that famous madman, walked into florida and built a multibillion dollar entertainment empire in a swamp in the middle of florida. the swamp did not forget. the swamp is eating the old and broken things in the heart of glittering, new disney world. the swamp is all. if you hear low, piglike snorting from the swamp, you’re told it’s gators in mating season, even if it isn’t mating season.
(you’re better off believing it’s the gators.)
the humidity. the heat. the humidity. tourists drop by the scores, heatstroke in July and August. you wear your sweat like a second skin and every breath is wet. florida would never have been settled if not for the timely invention of the air conditioner. that is a true story. once we grew oranges, strawberries, produce. we shipped them all over the states. before the freezes of the 1980s. before the blue tabebuia inexplicably all died. (not the yellow or the pink, only the blue, the rarest and most beautiful.) now we export only tourist memories.
the ocean is nigh unreachable in part of the state, an unfamiliar and ugly wetland where they used to launch men into the stars. take a road. drive east. go over a bridge. drive east. go over another bridge. drive east. drive into a wilderness of scrub and palmettos until you finally hear the ocean, an hour later than you thought it would take. the barrier islands go layer upon layer into the waters of the Atlantic, and you have to wonder why so many strips of land. is the land trying to prevent people on the sea from coming to the shore–or is it trying to keep the people on the shore from ever reaching the ocean?
i hear popping shots at night, in the woods outside my home. in ten years i have never discovered what the sound is.
i pray it’s only men shooting at stop signs in the dark.
I live in Louisiana, where out most famous city has to lock its cemeteries to prevent bones being stolen from graves by people who perform dark rites out in the swamps designed to appease spirits of death and knowledge. I was born in Georgia where we joke about the Appalachian folk north of us, but do our best to leave them alone and not think too hard about what they get up to in the hills. For generations the wild places in this nation have held a kind of dark mystic aura, and we can feel the power and hunger that seeps out of them and invites us in like a lure.
Well, I can’t write the weird kind of real life horror the way others before me have, but I can guarantee from life in (fairly) rural Nevada that you *don’t* look out the fucking window at night. You just turn over in bed and pretend you didn’t hear anything. Just stay inside until morning and the sun bakes the outside of the house (or the pale, thin light bleaches the color out of everything until it feels pretty safe, if it’s winter). Some of the more terrifying times I remember were waiting for the bus alone when my sister was sick and the wind gusts hard enough that it shakes sticks out of the trees and then the wind stops blowing but the trees don’t seem to stop shaking soon enough and the bus can’t fucking get there soon enough.
New Englanders don’t even feel the cold anymore. We are winter. The frost is in our blood now. It owns us. Even when the summer comes we joke that winters coming soon. Better get the rock salt and shovels ready. Better not get to used to the sun. We don’t belong to it, we belong to the cold. We laugh when the tourists come to see the fall leaves, laugh white smiles full of snow because we know what they don’t. That everything they see is a pretty lure. Come see the leaves and the harvest decorations and the pretty Christmas lights. Come stay for a while. Stay. It’s nice here isn’t it? Stay. It’s getting awful cold. You better stay the night. Stay forever. Stay.
Missouri is a land of gateways. The Gateway Arch, the Gateway to the West. In the hills to the east you can still hear the tribes who built the earth into vales and mounds; in the flatlands to the west, the monotonous clicking and clacking of wheels as they cross the prairie echo from the trees. In the middle, there are caves, thousands of caves of limestone that catch and repeat voices–you hear your own voice in the murmurs, but you haven’t said anything yet.
A land of centuries of contrarians, of change that means nothing because it is a land of change. Here was both east and west. Here was both north and south. Here there is nothing, and everything. Arrive at the fur trader’s posts, where the French built cities older than states to the east; leave from Independence, the town named for the thought of leaving. There’s no part of Missouri that’s not filled with ghosts.
You’d better stock up–it’s a long way to Oregon Territory. Or better yet–just stay a while.
I grew up swimming in the graves of drowned men. The ghosts of the Edmund Fitzgerald linger in Lake Superior. The neighbor’s child wandered away from her mother and into the arms of an undertow in Lake Huron. When I was eight the helicopters swept over Saginaw Bay in search of a lost swimmer. That summer I learned what extended exposure to water and heat does to a corpse – how even a strong swimmer can sink beneath the whitecaps only to gain buoyancy in death.
We call them The Great Lakes, but we really should call them inland seas. They hold shipwrecks and ruins and the dead, and when you’re in the backcountry and hear the loons’ eerie laughter echoing over the waters of Lake Michigan you can’t help but wonder what else lies beneath the surface.
in the north we don’t have the option of not looking outside when it’s dark; in the winter it’s dark all the time. 4 hours of weak blue daylight, 4 hours of twilight, 16 hours of pitch black night. did you know you can howl conversations with wolves?
It was genuinely disquieting to me how whenever you turn around, you could see the mountains. Maybe it’s just because I had stereotypical American decadence on the brain–I mean, it was Vegas—but I kept thinking of the T.J. Eckleburg billboard from the Great Gatsby, but how the mountains are much, much older, and distinctly inhuman. Also, there’s something horribly Biblical about mountains, especially when they overlook cities full of Sin™….that wrath from high atop the thing requires a high thing, and looming over a sere, flat plain, the mountains of Las Vegas look like they qualify.
I kept thinking that that they were a reminder, that however glittering this neon Babel—whatever atoms man split in the desert wastes below—this too would pass, all would pass, and the mountains would still be there. They would sit in judgment, still.
Whereas the Smoky Mountains don’t sit in judgment. They don’t loom. They run along the land, under it, and swell towards crags and peaks and curves; they are the land. They inspire awe, rather than terror. You have to respect the Smokies, certainly—almost 500 people have died in the park since it opened, and the Little River Lumber Company’s death doll no doubt adds to that number—but if you approach it with respect, the Smokies seem to open up, to unfold in invitation. There are waterfalls and pockets of green, cool shade, hidden deer tracks and plant life of a hundred kinds to study.
If the mountains outside of Vegas are the harshest, most absolute sort of god, a profoundly alien and absolutist justice, then the Smoky Mountains are the closest thing I’ve known to a goddess—not any smaller, or more human, but engulfing and green and very holy.
“If only he had died like Hedwig, so quickly he would not have known it
happened. Or if he could have launched himself in front of a wand to
save someone he loved… He envied even his parents’ deaths now. This
cold-blooded walk to his own destruction would require a different kind
of bravery.”
have y’all seen that nasa pic of the earth with the sun behind it on the night time side it really really fucked me up my own soul became solid and like………….. weeped!
who wouldn’t see this and then look deeply into their own emotional playing field to see what improvements could be made purely inspired by the vulnerable earth. this is the face of all literal gods
just moving along like everyone else 