What I Talk About When I Talk About Studio

He grew up two blocks from Highland Park in the top apartment of a house with chimes dripping from the porch. The balcony always felt rich to me, and the galley kitchen, backlit by a window, got pierced by the sun at setting time. In the first visits I remember, maybe 2014 and earlier, we left for Manhattan while the sun rose and got home as it set, so Brooklyn was only golden to me. Yellow and beaming. 

We pressed ourselves through a crowded sidewalk on 42nd Street and Dad said, “This city is one big organism.” I nodded and looked around, felt the organism, the waves swelling and dipping. We spent the day wading through the pulling tide of bodies. I used to pinch the hem of my dad’s shirt in crowds so I wouldn’t lose him. I don’t anymore; New York teaches you how to leave people. You spend an hour learning a woman’s face on the subway and then sever the bond. 

We took the train to the top of Manhattan, and I stepped out onto the stained concrete ground of my new world. My new world was militarized, gated, and empty, so we squinted through iron bars to peek at the library. I kept repeating iterations of affirmations like, “the energy feels good though, even though we can’t see anything,” as we passed guards with guns.

On the train back to Brooklyn, Dad spaced out while I listened to Von Dutch on loop. He tapped my shoulder at the Bowery Street platform and said, “You know, this is a great train, the J.” I nodded because it was great, until six million more people entered, and the organism swallowed us again. I stood to give my seat to a baby, but while the baby was descending from her mother’s hip, a man stole the seat. This city is so cold, I thought. This city is so cold, but everyone is together, always. 

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I’m writing a play in Studio about the end of the world. It’s called Creation Myth because I can’t stare death in the eyes, and it’s a play so I can speak through characters instead of speaking through myself. I like to write but I don't know if that’s true. I like to talk to myself but it’s never for myself. I talk to myself like someone else can hear it. 

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to tell people I love them more often, so on Friday I texted Gracie and told her that I’m grateful for her, immediately punctuating it with “because my New Year’s resolution is to tell people I love them more often,” to pin my confession on some external force, even though the external force was me, my own self-reflective goal. 

I spend a lot of time worrying that I love things more than other people love things. Like Studio. It is January and I love Studio. Mr. Zencka excuses himself to shuffle laps around the school when the Girl Talk gets too Girl. Me and Lizzie excuse ourselves to shuffle laps around the school when the Girl Talk gets shut down. After school yesterday Mr. Zencka walked into his room when Lizzie and I were laying on his couch. Lizzie said “you scared us” and he apologized for walking into his own room. It was all funny. I explained to him what dream blunt rotation meant, and he said “what about dream funeral guest list? Is that popular?”

It’s embarrassing to be friends with someone for a long time and no one talks about that. I randomly felt mortified yesterday while I was sitting with Lizzie. I guess that’s the thing of having a friend for so long. I feel like that when I’m reading my journals sometimes. Horrified, I mean, thinking that the person from my pages was walking around in the world. In the chip aisle of Wegman’s, Joanne O’Connor told me to “always keep journaling. Keep two journals. Because when you journal about something,” here she caught a fistful of air, “you have it. Forever.” Joanne didn’t realize that that’s the problem.

Lizzie did not want to have a baby until maybe last week when she had a baby in her dream. She said she loved it and took care of it, I asked what it looked like, and she said “it looked like me” (obviously). Twenty minutes later, while we walked through the Bradlee Building, we passed a string of kindergarteners and Lizzie realized that her dream baby was Madison the kindergartener. We’ve been reading a lot and experimenting with veganism and having pregnancy dreams—clearly doing super well.

Maybe I like winter because real life is hidden under the snow—it’s nice to be away from it all for a few months. On Monday, I sat on Mr. Zencka’s red couch with Lizzie and felt glad to have the red couch as a place to land between stints in New York. I asked Lizzie if she thinks I’m funny and she said yes. I feel like every English teacher I’ve had has mothered me in a different way, and I imagine visiting this school as my college self and feeling like a baby again. 

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I don't love all of New York but I love that parts of it are mine. I’ve never seen the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge, and my first time seeing the Christmas tree at the Rock was this year. My New York is the golden galley kitchen, limbel from a cart, fire hydrants cracked in concrete heat, a serrated skyline view from the Triborough Bridge. My New York is a paradox: we walked around in the cold, me and my dad, I counted the houses with lights, and I realized that his neighborhood in Brooklyn had more Christmas decorations than my suburban neighborhood upstate. His neighborhood in Brooklyn was quieter than my suburban neighborhood, and felt more loving, too. 

In July I had a meltdown because everyone was busy during my one week off of work. I was babysitting identical twin five-year-olds and their mean dog named Carl who was always either biting or humping me, and when my five-day break came, Lizzie was in Cooperstown, Grace was in New York, Sonia was in Boston, and Miguel was in Long Island, so I bought a train ticket to D.C., and Mom dropped me off at the station in Syracuse twelve hours later.  You can’t get from Syracuse to Union Station on one train, you need two—you need to stop in New York in the middle. I climbed to the second floor of Penn Station to find a window to look out of, and caught the rigid view of the skyline. Even in July, when my train ticket said I'd end up in DC, New York was the destination. New York was always the destination.