May 15, 1999
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I have lived in Michigan for twenty-one years, eighteen of which were spent in my parents' house. It sits on top of a hill, overlooking a small inland lake where I used to swim and fish with my father. Until 1986, there were only two other houses on our gravel road, and the nearest supermarket still requires a twenty-minute drive. I graduated from grade school with seventeen classmates, moving on to a high school with a still-modest student population of eight hundred. For college, I moved to Ann Arbor, where I have lived on-and-off for the past three years.

And today, I moved to New York City. Evan and I flew into La Guardia, a nervewracking experience that made me understand why people do not fly often. After deboarding the Metal Bird of Nausea, I moved into the old St. George Hotel. The room is liveable, if slightly rundown, but there's something rather honorable about living simply. That's a generous way to describe this room, with its stained carpet and leaky faucet, but at least there are no insects. Yet.

I start work in two days, and fortunately work is only one subway stop away. I've used the subways of four cities, I believe: London, Paris, Chicago, and now, New York City. Oddly, they all smell the same. Certainly each city uses similar trains, similar tracks, perhaps even similar Metrocard machines. However, as cities, each smells different. It's perplexing, then, that their subways share identical scents of grease and people and stale air. If you blindfolded me, tied the knot so tightly as to crush my eyelashes, and placed me in a random subway station, I would be lost.

People have been asking me about New York: Are you excited? Where are you staying? Do you know your roommate? And how long will you be out there? Any chance of coming back to Michigan one weekend? What are you and Evan going to do? And so on. I don't know how to answer these questions, as I've not invested enough time evaluating them for myself. There's been a numbness to me lately. Aside from missing my family and a smallish group of friends, I feel very little emotion upon leaving Ann Arbor. Bridges have been burned between former friends; there is a sneaking suspicion that I shall return to Michigan as an outsider. But still there is something cheerful: curling my neck around the open window, I see the Manhattan Bridge standing tall in the near distance.