Draft 1 of Nostalgic Irony

Nostalgic Irony

The body is a vessel. It’s marvelous, it’s a room. There is a singular noise to be heard from said room, a particular beating driven from such a place that has the largest capacity, the largest potential, to do practically anything. But it beats. It drives you, the individual, to a destination unknown to you, so eloquently, so exquisitely. Do all you can to ensure you are content with where you end up.

A goldfish will die in saltwater. Its body isn’t equipped to handle it. It serves its purpose in a different setting, it wants to live where it’s comfortable; it will flock to what its cells feel compatible with, a thought so realistically unfamiliar to the body as a whole, like a secret language every entity dances to. Think of the latent forlorn feeling of losing your place. This experience washes over the train of thought you have, it overwhelms it to the point of derailing it. Where are you?

I blink. The familiar street corner that appeared in front of me through the only window available now shows gallant buildings constantly being worked on, the furthest one advertising a lottery. My night sky, pale and empty, has its own idea. It shines bright, geometrically illuminating as far as I can see through these frames. The city is different. Its unfamiliarity to me is as obvious as a candle in a dark room; I fail to hear “Manhattan’s breathing”, as E.B. White says, its vitality that of a person with inner workings, thoughts, desires.

My mind zooms to home, or what was. I blame my upbringing. There is a terrifying disparity between fantasy and reality; it pains me to feel the almost bittersweet comfort in the honesty of the city that is many arrive “to escape, not face, reality”. My home, a two story structure, built like a cot made to withstand the test of time, now a room in a building that reminds me of the Empire State Building. My fences are gone, now a clever mix of concrete and glass, and while White is right, there is a particular reason as to why this city is the “destination… the goal” despite being built on practical contempt. If you want invisibility, you’re in the best place. Your face, forgettable, thanks to the city’s “gift of privacy” and insulated individuality.

Sometimes I relay to myself, in hindsight this probably was not the best decision, and other times I remember the sobering feeling of sobbing on a sidewalk corner feeling lost, all in place, in mind, and in time. The city has a beautiful ability to “[compress] all life, all races and breeds, into [such] a small island” that subdues the few, but strangely many, quips and whims the mind seems to have when it lurches at the possibility that perhaps “it is healthier to live in a community where, when a cornice falls, you feel the blow” and you feel important, rather than irrelevant, and pointless. But if the “price of [your] ambition is a life closer to death”, as Brian Doyle says, then perhaps there is joy to be had when living in the fast lane, that there’s a form of happiness that can be somehow successfully derived from its “forlornness or forsakenness”, by White’s terms. How awful it must be to not fully comprehend, to have to balance between the unreasonable destruction or fulfillment of an individual in such a stunning place that almost hand delivers “spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale”.

Dreams and desires are equivalent to each other: when deferred they have the uttermost potential to have our “hearts grow cold”, as Doyle says. Potential is the key word. Whether one wants a new job or another wants to go to a new place, there are risks, there are always risks. You quit your job. You sell your home. Human beings are so interesting; how is it a person can honestly be happy spending their precious “two billion heartbeats” living a life they are comfortable with changing on a dime? With the flick of a wrist, the thought of change plants itself in your head, it grows and suffers, taut for nutrition, and in sensing its thirst for the sun, blooms within your eyes with the target it originally had for you.

I flew over a thousand miles into the bright light. It was gorgeous distraction to the distraught feeling that consumed my insides. I had longed for the chance to start over, to get an opportunity to leave where I had grown up, and home paled in comparison of the city. Suburbia, the wishy washy idea of balancing residency with a side of big city dreams, never prepared me for the environment I walked in on. The stereotype was true. As I walked within a crowd of motley individuals consumed with their own lives, I wore a cloak of invisibility. There was a scary air filled with the “gift of privacy” and utter abandonment that could render a person practically senseless.

I wanted so much for the cliché. I wanted to laugh instantaneously with a stranger and end up becoming their confidant, their friend. I wanted to bump into the man of dreams on the street, share a conversation, and continuously pinch myself as I asked myself whether the experience was real and truly happening right before me. I so wished for a chance to be so immersed with my surroundings on a journey elsewhere that I find myself in an abandoned library of sorts and just ooze and pour of the bounty of literature right before me. My thoughts, putrid birds flying onto my shoulder tops, would chirp their inner songs urging me to fulfill the tiniest wants: get lost here, find this, try that, and go wherever.

Freedom was never a choice for me. From a young age until I found myself in college, my parents enforced the strict understanding that my life was not my own. How does a caged bird fully embrace an open door? Is it too afraid to fly out, for fear of the unknown, or does it leave, completely and entirely hopeful that its life will get better, that everything ultimately gets better?

If deferred dreams dry in the sun only to float away in the wind, turning into specs of dust, then we must recognize that we are “utterly open with no one in the end”, as Doyle states, and to make our dreams an actuality, no matter where they may possibly take us, but it across the street, in a car, or on a plane. These actions will get a reaction, and that reaction is the insurance of “rejuvenation” so plentiful it will creep into the corners of your mind that hid away the childish urges to cater to your heart’s quirks, to whatever possibly allowed you to be happy instead of the ordinary humdrum that you fell accustomed into living.

The city is beautiful. It’s living, it is alive. It’s full of wonderful chances to ruin your life and sprout like a phoenix and start over once more. It wants to play with your heartstrings and make you forget about the “What Ifs” so that you know why the fascination can’t die, so that you too try to horribly fall into its chaotic humdrum only to realize that such a plight is impossible and unrealistic. Yet take joy in it. Find the happiness, find a form of happiness, in any way you possibly can. There is such a loveliness to the neglected thought that receives water again. There is such a joy that can arise from living a dream, not matter how extravagant. Take matters into your hands instead of dwelling on the possibilities that can arise from an idea; take an idea and put it into action.