FREE, I scrawl on the whiteboard that used to hang above my writing desk, a tiny glass desk I rarely used during my first two years as an MFA graduate student. I’d instead favored typing in bed—hard enough to eat away the surfaces of the “s,” “e,” “n,” and space bar keys—listening to an unending soundtrack: trilling laughter from the frat house across the street, packs of twenty-somethings teetering in heels, bars bustling on Amsterdam, guttural honks from the fire station next door, and the continuous sidewalk chatter happening day and night, at every hour.
Every hour until that week—that awful week in March of 2020—when the symphony abruptly ceased, replaced with the single refrain of siren after siren after siren, punctuated only by the occasional clip of a suitcase frantically rolling down the sidewalk as Columbia’s campus evacuated.
That or, worse, silence.
Finally, I too fled with a single suitcase. My husband and I took one final look at our 400 square foot student apartment before closing the front door, figuring we’d be back in a few weeks, not floating between states indefinitely for a year while subletters slept in our sheets.
I stare at the whiteboard note, bite my lip, then add: ITEMS IN GREAT CONDITION, LOOKING FOR A GOOD HOME. DIDN’T HAVE TIME TO SELL.
The whiteboard now sits outside on 113th Street, balanced on a checkered yellow chair my husband never liked, next to a plastic dresser that held my socks and gloves, beside a box of mismatched drinking cups. Most items we’d received secondhand, free to us at one time, or priced so low I struggled to complain about sleep when the bed cost all of $10. I’d told myself from the beginning that this was all temporary, like so many homes in my life. Correction: every home. So why the sudden sting?
I’ve just begun, and my t-shirt has already soaked through thanks to the exertion and late spring humidity. I don’t have time to look too closely at my possessions or their containers, nor time for the feelings getting stirred up.
I go back inside for the lamps to add to the amassing pile.
I’m no closer to knowing what home means than I was at age fifteen, the age when I left my unstable mother’s house for good. In simple terms: that home tried and failed to be the kind we sang about in church or printed on the cover of FHE manuals. Whenever I dream, that tan A-frame in suburban Utah with its towering maple tree provides the default setting, a place full of haunts and tired questions I have spent a lifetime running from, then trying to answer head-on: Why do I feel like an exile? Am I capable of taking root? Do I deserve love? I am no closer to a firm understanding, though I have given up on the idea of home being a fixed place or a sanctuary to return to. And if home is more of a feeling, my feeling itself seems somewhat adrift from the norm. What glimpses of “home” I have encountered while living as a perennial wanderer I have found in piercing moments of belonging tinged with something like sadness, singular and sometimes fleeting, precious perhaps because I feel them to be slipping away even in the moment of seeing them in their full dimensions.
New York, I apprehend in this moment of delayed closure, often had that kind of dimension—more than I dared to realize.
Inside the apartment, I look around. A stack of cardboard boxes along the wall mark what will go with me: clothes and books. With no decision on my next long-term location, the rest needs to go, and fast.
I could do it, I had told myself before booking an overdue flight back to New York City with an air of literal and figurative distance. I could definitely move out of this apartment, largely on my own, in two days. I’d take a few leisurely breaks to visit the towering Saint John the Divine Cathedral on the corner or take my usual circuit through Central Park, like I did a year ago before my favorite reading spots became tarped over with white hospital tents in preparation for a war. And it felt like a war zone, I remember, but try hard to not allow that to be the overwhelming memory of my time here.
None of my plans manifested the way I’d imagined, but I accept the new reality. Though frustrated my husband’s work schedule interfered with his helping me, I also recognize that I am, oddly, happier doing this on my own. A feral, nomadic part of me needs and wants to dismantle this home, this important chapter of my life, alone. I’d come here like so many, with the dizzying dream of becoming a writer, itching to document life’s constant passing and guess at its meanings.
When I haul out the full-length mirror, I see someone has taken the lamps, the dresser, and even the food and kitchenware. All gone in a matter of minutes. A Manhattan sidewalk miracle. I stare for a moment with my mouth agape before going back inside.
It might be worth noting that I never particularly liked the apartment. It sat on the first floor, offering no views of the city stacked above. The bedroom never got dark or quiet, so I couldn’t sleep without earplugs, an eye mask, and a white noise machine. The walls were sickly white and bare. The buzzer didn’t work, so friends shouted our names at the window. The bathroom doorknob had a tendency to fall off, and the radiators offered two settings: “off” or “inferno.” Mice wedged their way past the edges of pipes and sometimes the rough wood floor snagged my socks. But still. It was mine, a corner of the world in what sometimes felt like The City of Possibility and sometimes like a too-crowded swimming pool with oily, murky water, one that made me question how anyone had convinced me this was fun at all.
I finally have the good sense to reach out to an LDS Housing group to ask if anyone wants free stuff. I receive a flood of responses with Zion-ish energy:
I’ll take the rice cooker.
I can pick up the bookshelves tonight.
Is the A/C still available?
The person who comes for the A/C unit takes one look at me—greasy ponytail and teeth I haven’t had time to brush since yesterday—and asks, “Do you need help?”
Yes. Yes I need help.
We are Mormon. Of course she will ask. Of course I will respond. It is my chance to break the script, but I don’t. Besides, a strange part of me enjoys this, witnessing every savory trace of this home disappear before my eyes.
“I’m fine,” I say. “My husband will be here later tonight.” After I’m done. Hours before we pick up a small U-Haul. “But I promise to text if I change my mind.”
“Please do.” She eyes me carefully as she wheels the A/C onto the sidewalk.
Even with Church members picking up things, I still have a lot of items left unclaimed. Encouraged by the disappearing treasures, I take more armloads to the curb.
One by one, they leave without a trace. Almost like whole pieces of me, clear and sharp as day, suddenly swept away, still burning in my memory. In great condition. Still searching for a good home.
We tell so many stories about home, some that sometimes reek of brochures: what it’s supposed to look like, feel like, be like—similar to the pre-packaged images and experiences I was told I’d have during my time in New York. In the end—and there is always the end—it was that and something a little different. Personal, private, special not because of a timeless allure or trope, but because part of the place insists on staying alive in me anyway, too bright to forget. Perhaps I’d learned what writer Colson Whitehead meant when he said, “Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.”1 For me, home might be a verb instead of a noun, this searching thing I do while wandering from city to city, state to state, country to country, planting places in my heart that I inevitably—regrettably—leave. And yet, those pieces grow within me, time and distance working like sunshine, sprouting unpredictable things.
Dusk falls on my last night in town. Only a few hours to go.
The whiteboard is gone, so I rip a paper from an old notebook and re-write the message, then tape it to the fence.
I can feel life beginning anew again, with the swiftness and grace of a sidewalk picked clean.
Even in the snatches I steal on this frantic trip, everything about the Upper West Side seems familiar. I ride the Subway again. I speed walk through campus to drop off a set of keys. I buy the same salad from the same corner market. But I also feel the difference, and not just the COVID difference, but that old, familiar change within me of life moving on. Gone are the days of laughing on the concrete steps of the common with my classmates, running into fancy writers in the too-small bathrooms of Dodge Hall, or celebrating what would have been our graduation together. But still, I remember the violent yellow of the daffodils that final spring, when I was here and had a reliable address. I remember the night I stormed to the Hudson River and threw rocks with fury into the water. I remember the downpour and pile of vomit at Penn Station when I first emerged above ground, fresh from saying goodbye to another beloved home. And I remember the day I took a train to the top of Manhattan to 207th Street, then walked 13 miles along Broadway until I reached Battery Park with a view of the Statue of Liberty, just because I wanted to. Just because I could. Because I was there. I was alive and hungry to be aware of it. And maybe that, in the end, is my home. That knee-dropping reminder that I am alive and here, rooted to some place in fixed time, sometimes brave enough to recognize it before it goes.
The apartment echoes. My teeth feel coated with moss, and I have Magic Eraser sponges hanging out of my gym shorts. My muscles ache all over. I’m still dragging odds and ends to the curb late into the night. To my astonishment and relief, all but the yellow checkered chair remains (perhaps my husband had been right about that one after all).
My tiny glass desk is the last thing I drag to the sidewalk. I place it carefully against the fence, a symbol of best intentions and a good time spent, and hope someone will whisk it away while I sleep one final night on 502 W 113th Street, a home I briefly claimed, one where I typed hard enough to eat away laptop keys, one where I tried to live that loudly, with directness and hot intensity in the face of everything never meant to last—a place all the more beautiful for it.
Rachel Rueckert currently drifts between Manhattan, Boston, and Salt Lake City. She is the Editor in Chief of Exponent II and is completing an MFA at Columbia University. Twitter: @rachel_rueckert | Website: rachelrueckert.com
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