Coming Home to Somewhere Unfamiliar

My childhood started in New York City and then ping-ponged back and forth across the country until my mother and I finally came back to the East Village the summer before I started high school. As soon as my Converse touched the sun-scorched sidewalk, I grew deep, stubborn roots. New York was home; it was where I had learned to walk on the cracked sidewalks, and where all of my earliest memories were formed. In the first few years of my life, my heartbeat and breath had aligned themselves to the rhythm of New York so that nowhere else ever felt right.

When we moved back, I felt like I was finally returning, as if from a long war. But I also felt like I was starting over, with no friends, no routines, nothing familiar or grounding. Both were true. I was in the strange position of coming home to somewhere unfamiliar.

That first summer, my mother and I stayed in the back room of my godmother Hannah’s vintage store on Ludlow Street, sharing a loft bed high above her racks of inventory. At night, we slept next to each other, sweaty in the July heat, breathing in the smells of old fabric. During the day, my mother tried to find work and an apartment, and I walked around the old-and-new neighborhood, trying to make up for seven years of absence. I traced and retraced routes between the three nearest subway stations, the park, the river, the corner stores and diners. I memorized subway lines and my coffee order, fast-forwarding familiarity. I sat on the same bench in Tompkins Square Park every day until it felt like mine. Pacing the neighborhood, scenting it like a cat, I felt equal parts a vast, quenching relief and an aching, hollow sadness. I was home, but even at home I floated around the edges, slightly removed.

Because of the way youth stretches time, I felt like my father’s death two years earlier had been long enough ago that I wasn’t allowed to let it be a central part of my life anymore. It had been two whole grades ago, two cross-country moves ago, starting-to-wear-a-bra ago. Another life. It was something horrible that had happened in my childhood, but I was fourteen now and it was time to grow up and move on.

When I look back now, it’s clear that two