full circle

Stage one of moving to New Jersey:

Bemusement. We're here? We're really here? We did it? This is so strange. And yet it's not. It's so normal. How strange that it's normal. Are you sure we're here and not imagining it? It doesn't feel as different, as extraordinary as I expected. I walk around New York and don't feel that intense longing I'm used to feeling. Is this a bad idea, then? Is it different enough? Am I overthinking it? It just feels like, well, life. How can it feel so normal?

Are we really here?

Stage two of moving to New Jersey:

We drive up the Garden State Parkway to Dan's parents. We see trees tipped with yellow, a hint of autumn. We see trees, just a few, striped with brilliant red like someone spilled a can of paint on a swath of leaves on the still-green tree.

We kiss Damian goodbye, he trots off to enjoy his grandparents, we slip outside. This is why we came, one of the many reasons. That we can do this. That we have family.

We drive into Manhattan. Down the Henry Hudson (formerly known as the West Side Highway), memories of driving home to the Upper West Side after a summer in the Berkshires, gazing at the Hudson River, at the Palisades hills of New Jersey, at the backs of the stately apartment buildings along Riverside Drive, at basketball courts. We've done this drive as visitors. Are we still visitors, then?

We park in Chelsea, walk down along a row of restaurants, choose one. Dark inside, British-pub-feel, but also so New York. Pressed tin ceiling, Tiffany lamps, wood paneling. Quiet. A sense of history. A sense of place. This I missed, this feeling that the outside and the inside matched, that you can walk from an active, alive street scene into a restaurant that felt like part of the community, a continuity, rather than driving in a sea of traffic to a mini mall standing like an island isolated and alone, which in retrospect describes most of Los Angeles to me. You swim from island to island. In New York you walk on pathways through woods, a complete environment.

We go to a friend's party, a crush of people in a loud room filled with leather (leatherette?) benches against brick walls. I watch the animated faces. It's a film party but very few of the people here are too pretty. Very few are too blond for their skin color. Very few are done up. Most of the women are as ethnic looking as I am. Some of the men look at me, notice me. It's been a long time. I began to get used to being invisible in Los Angeles. I looked different, outside the definition of the feminine. Here I fit. Female, human, part of the group, part of this world. I watch the faces. They look right to me. Incredibly varied, this is not about one ethnicity or another. This is about something else. About being home. That must be it.

We leave the party, walk into the warm night, head back to the car and back to our child, sleeping peacefully in the room his aunt slept in as a teen.

The next morning, Friday, we get in the car, drive down the Parkway to get Damian to school. As we enter Montclair, our new town, I look around with the beginning tingle of this is home.

Stage two of moving to New Jersey: happiness. I'm finally beginning to accept the fact of the change. And it feels so very right.