long beach.
Living in a beach town makes up for leaving Brooklyn in ways I didn't expect.
When I initially agreed to move in with Dan and away from the city, I felt like my heart was breaking. I felt at home in Brooklyn, in a way that I never had while I was in DC. I loved the noise, the people, the way my street felt when walking my dog at 5:00 am. I loved watching old Italian grandmothers hang out of their windows and talk to people across the street the same way they probably had been every morning for the past 40 years. I loved my park, different than McCarren Park, where all the hip kids were. My park full of families and drunks, and tired people like me who were walking their dogs. I loved seeing those dogs and their people, all of us linked by what was happening in the run, and friends because of it, even if in reality, these were people I would never talk to. I loved the diner where the wait staff knew me, the Korean grocery where the night clerk would make a fuss over Kaiya but ignore everything else in the world, and the bars filled with people who seemed sane and normal to me. Leaving this, for Long Island, was a torture for me to which I couldn't really imagine a pleasant ending.
So something that should have been happy, moving in with my boyfriend, seemed like torture. The last thing I wanted to do after getting out of work, was to get onto the crowded LIRR train filled with obnoxious business men screaming into their cell phones about some deal they just landed, then calling their wives to make sure dinner had been started. Or the horrible women who were on their phones and complained endlessly about the most trivial things. Or the feeling of people stepping on me and walking into me like I'm not there because I'm small, and clearly, it was very important for them to walk down the aisle to get to another crowded car on the train. By the time I got home to a house that wasn't my home, I just wanted to sleep. Even my walks with Kaiya had become miserable, always the same loop, without seeing a single other person walking, through a horrible suburbia with loud people who gave me evil looks as if to say, "get that filthy animal away from my perfectly manicured lawn that I never use." The entire time I lived there, I saw five people out walking their dogs, and each of those dogs, little white ones, were snarling evil things who couldn't even be on the same block as us without going into a fit of barks. I didn't understand the people there, how they could treat each other so horribly and never say hello, or how they would get into their expensive cars and drive to a drug store that was a five minute walk away.
I told Dan that the only way I thought I could be happy out here was if we moved to a different town. I needed a place that actually felt like it had a community, in more than a parent PTA kind of way. I told him that the only place I could imagine living was Long Beach, because even if the town sucked, at least I'd be able to walk to the ocean to clear my mind. So we looked and looked and when I was finally getting to the point where I was ready to give up on the idea of living in a place that I felt sure could make me happy, this apartment came along. And a day after first seeing it, we had the keys in our hands and we standing out on the balcony, together, alone, and I suddenly felt, for the first time in months, like things were going to be okay. People sped by on their bikes, and somwhere I heard the sounds of a big dog barking. The simplest things here make me happy. People relying heavily on their bikes for transportation. Couples walking with friendly dogs. Smiling at people on the sidewalks and having them actually say hello back. Crossing over the bay on the train ride home. The sounds of my bike tires rolling along the boardwalk on the final leg of my journey. "It's a little bit like Brooklyn, isn't it?" asked Dan. "Well, except without all the people in tight jeans and nerd glasses and good taste in music, but plus the ocean, so I think that makes up for it." And he's right.
I've lived in different kinds of places. Rural PA, Metro DC, Brooklyn, Suburbia NY, with a thousand different ideas in between. And now a beach town. Always trying to find something that worked for me. Maybe I found it, this time.
When I initially agreed to move in with Dan and away from the city, I felt like my heart was breaking. I felt at home in Brooklyn, in a way that I never had while I was in DC. I loved the noise, the people, the way my street felt when walking my dog at 5:00 am. I loved watching old Italian grandmothers hang out of their windows and talk to people across the street the same way they probably had been every morning for the past 40 years. I loved my park, different than McCarren Park, where all the hip kids were. My park full of families and drunks, and tired people like me who were walking their dogs. I loved seeing those dogs and their people, all of us linked by what was happening in the run, and friends because of it, even if in reality, these were people I would never talk to. I loved the diner where the wait staff knew me, the Korean grocery where the night clerk would make a fuss over Kaiya but ignore everything else in the world, and the bars filled with people who seemed sane and normal to me. Leaving this, for Long Island, was a torture for me to which I couldn't really imagine a pleasant ending.
So something that should have been happy, moving in with my boyfriend, seemed like torture. The last thing I wanted to do after getting out of work, was to get onto the crowded LIRR train filled with obnoxious business men screaming into their cell phones about some deal they just landed, then calling their wives to make sure dinner had been started. Or the horrible women who were on their phones and complained endlessly about the most trivial things. Or the feeling of people stepping on me and walking into me like I'm not there because I'm small, and clearly, it was very important for them to walk down the aisle to get to another crowded car on the train. By the time I got home to a house that wasn't my home, I just wanted to sleep. Even my walks with Kaiya had become miserable, always the same loop, without seeing a single other person walking, through a horrible suburbia with loud people who gave me evil looks as if to say, "get that filthy animal away from my perfectly manicured lawn that I never use." The entire time I lived there, I saw five people out walking their dogs, and each of those dogs, little white ones, were snarling evil things who couldn't even be on the same block as us without going into a fit of barks. I didn't understand the people there, how they could treat each other so horribly and never say hello, or how they would get into their expensive cars and drive to a drug store that was a five minute walk away.
I told Dan that the only way I thought I could be happy out here was if we moved to a different town. I needed a place that actually felt like it had a community, in more than a parent PTA kind of way. I told him that the only place I could imagine living was Long Beach, because even if the town sucked, at least I'd be able to walk to the ocean to clear my mind. So we looked and looked and when I was finally getting to the point where I was ready to give up on the idea of living in a place that I felt sure could make me happy, this apartment came along. And a day after first seeing it, we had the keys in our hands and we standing out on the balcony, together, alone, and I suddenly felt, for the first time in months, like things were going to be okay. People sped by on their bikes, and somwhere I heard the sounds of a big dog barking. The simplest things here make me happy. People relying heavily on their bikes for transportation. Couples walking with friendly dogs. Smiling at people on the sidewalks and having them actually say hello back. Crossing over the bay on the train ride home. The sounds of my bike tires rolling along the boardwalk on the final leg of my journey. "It's a little bit like Brooklyn, isn't it?" asked Dan. "Well, except without all the people in tight jeans and nerd glasses and good taste in music, but plus the ocean, so I think that makes up for it." And he's right.
I've lived in different kinds of places. Rural PA, Metro DC, Brooklyn, Suburbia NY, with a thousand different ideas in between. And now a beach town. Always trying to find something that worked for me. Maybe I found it, this time.