Detox

Well, I made it. 

One of my dearest friends in New York, JK, - wife of my oldest friend in the City, NK, and overall amazing human being - drove down with me in a rented SUV.  If you ever find yourself a friend who will drive 14 hours with you and a cat who peed on herself in New Jersey in a car with a blind-spot the size of Texas, hold onto that person for dear life.  JK, I love you.

It's been exactly two weeks since I officially landed in Chattanooga.  These last 14 days have felt a bit like a prolonged detox from New York.  I've avoided phone calls, text messages, and e-mails to the point of absurdity (sorry), and the idea of attending one of the crowded Fourth of July events this weekend nearly sent me into a panic.  Instead, I've mostly been hiding out in sparsely populated restaurants and cafes with my very understanding significant other - let's call him Mountain Man because it makes me giggle.

I'm just exhausted, and it might take a while to get over that.  Have patience with me.  I promise I'll make it up to you.

Two Weeks Out of Xanadu

"You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.
     Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwartz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu."  -Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That