a matter of semantics

When I first moved to New York to attend NYU, the thought of “leaving the island” was absurd. Going back to PA to visit was one thing, but leaving Manhattan to go to one of the…shudder…”other boroughs”…that was a whole different story. My first trip off the island to Astoria, Queens, during my sophomore year left me thinking two things: the train goes above ground? and, what state am I in? And yet just as Miranda from ‘Sex and the City’ eventually found her way off the island to start a family in Brooklyn, so have I and most of my friends moved a little farther away from what we all first thought was the nucleus of New York, if not the world. Manhattan.

The first few theatre gigs I took, I approached my time away from NYC with the exploratory pride of a New Yorker. “This is an interesting place, but I definitely do not belong here because I’m really supposed to be in New York….did I mention I’m from New York?...’cause I am…” Some cities I have visited offered no more than sheer tourist delight (say, all sixteen cities in Asia I toured in…I was not checking out facebook to see which friends from High School had moved to Guangzou) while others gave me a sense of impending return.

Only recently have I actually introduced the idea into my life that I will not be in New York forever. I love the city and all it has to offer, but having traveled to cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, I have allowed myself to see myself in a city other than the big apple. For the second year in a row, I spent a month of my summer in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and I couldn’t have been happier. Everything about the city sang to me, and all I had to do was close my eyes and I could see myself living there, taking yoga, riding my bike around the lake, freezing my ass off during the winter, learning to cross-country-ski, doing theatre, and being happy.

And perhaps it’s not the city that matters as much as the exhilaration of an unfastened future; that as far as I can tell at the moment, I barely know what city I’ll be in next winter, let alone in ten years from now. It’s daunting just as much as it is liberating. In the meantime, as I am soon to be without a home-base in New York (apartment drama!!), I’ll have to question where my true “home” is (a matter of semantics that my mother has been nudging me about ever since I went away to college). Right now, it’s the travel between cities that matters, not necessarily their distance from New York or Pennsylvania. Minneapolis yesterday, Dallas today, _______ “tomorrow?”s

(Minneapolis photos: above, left: Stone Arch Bridge at night; above, right: sunset near Stone Arch Bridge, Minneapolis skyline in the distance)