Spread Love, It's the Brooklyn Way

NEW BOROUGH.

Parquet ("Parquet"?) floor, newly waxed, hot, no air conditioning, cannot afford it, green trees and brownstones in various states of disrepair and loved different amounts, presumably. This house creaks. It could have a poltergeist. Doors slam and the walls make noises and the neighbors listen to the most terrible kind of Terrible Music, loudly, often. Someone has a dog. The hallway up the stairs -- four flights of stairs -- is lined with lead paint, an almost nauseating kitschy sky blue with cloud trim and pink highlights. Red spattered everywhere: a pit bull in heat? Barbecue sauce? Poured paint? My room, Ikea bed assembled. Three blocks from a shuttle metro, eight from the 2345, Franklin Avenue: broker-speak "up and coming", Dominican hair salons, stoop people, already a few familiar wanderers, the kind with nothing to do and no visible home but somehow wearing a different shirt each day, four brave hip coffee houses catering to those of us who wear fake glasses to hide from the world somehow. Delis. A liquor store that doesn't card. Walking distance to Tom's Diner, and the Brooklyn Museum, and Prospect Park (each with equal weight). This is a different realization of something I always imagined, imagined wanting, wanted. I live in New York in a way I didn't entirely before, I care about cleaning this apartment and decorating it and making it my own. It is my own, as much as my parent's rent checks and boxes of stuff can make anywhere "my own". You always dreamed of doing something, anything, anything glamorous anything fun anything worthy of your thoughts here in New York and this is the reality of that desire. I wonder if it will always feel as strange, realizing you have what you wanted. Wish fulfillment has so far left me a little hollow. Grateful, pleased, happy in a not-pedestrian sense but also empty and frightened. When you get what you want, you're left not wanting, and wanting is a massive part of existence. Or, you begin to want something else, and the moment of realizing that you're changing course is unsettling because you begin to understand you will never be the kind of happy you cannot articulate in a wish because you will always and only be wishing. Then the whole thing begins to seem pretty morose for one and self-absorbed, for two.

The beginning of this year feels grave. Maybe 'consequential' is a better word. This is a year for wanting big things in a concrete way, and making plans and establishing means to actively pursue these wants. In a handful of months I will be out of college, so scarily free. Where did I hear that funny thing -- 'there comes a point in life when you realize that all the decisions that led you to adulthood were made by a teenager. A stoned teenager.' A little girl in a big apartment, learning how to do dishes, talking big in public for the benefit of "tourists", contemplating substance abuse like a piece of interesting architecture, eating, not eating, buying bus tickets home ALREADY, afraid to feel good on the parquet ("parquet!"), what is there left to say? Alive? A metaphor? A reflection? Something to laugh at later as soon as this evening or in thirty years? Catch your breath, amiga. It's not another time zone, just another time: name it, we've got it. Make.