June 2017
Friday evening, 8 p.m., early summer, New York City. I sit at my desk, face aglow in Macintosh luminescence. On the desk sits the detritus of the hour, of the day, the week, the season. There is dinner of sushi in the little takeout tray from the supermarket. There is leftover coffee in a mug from the afternoon. There are books and notebooks and checkbooks. There are pens and lip balms and hair ties and postage stamps and unmatched earrings and a Metro-Card. There are a gazillion paper napkins for some reason. There is a computer modem whose lights flash with the irregular, listing cadence of a heart murmur. There are several Word documents up on that glowing screen, each competing for attention, not so much with one another, but with the email interface to which all roads lead back.
It is 1997. It is 2017. It doesn’t matter. It is both. In twenty years, my life has come full circle, 360 degrees for real. People often say 360 degrees when they mean 180. They say full circle when they’re really talking about a semicircle. It’s an oddly human error, as though they can’t quite grasp the concept of a human being turning on an axis as readily as the earth itself. But in my case, it’s true. At forty-seven, my life looks uncannily the same way it did at twenty-seven.
How did I get here? Nearly two decades ago, I moved from New York City to the Midwest and then to California, where I came as close to settling down as I’m probably ever going to come, which is to say I got married. Nearly two years ago, the marriage ended, and I got in the car and literally drove through my life in reverse. I drove west to east, backward in time, until I landed right back where I started: alone in a scuff-marked apartment in a clanking old Manhattan building much like the one I occupied in my twenties, eating supermarket sushi at my desk and trying mightily (yes, on a Friday evening) to complete a writing assignment that was due the week before.
There are a few differences, but they are minor. Because it is 2017 and not 1997, I am writing on a MacBook Air laptop and not a Quadra 650. The modem is wireless rather than dial-up, which means email comes in automatically and my opportunities for screen-based distraction and procrastination exceed anything I could have imagined back then. Thanks to these opportunities, I estimate that my attention span in 2017 is about 30 percent of what it was in 1997. Conversely, my rent back then was 30 percent of what it is now.
Same life, higher rent. This could be the motto of my life after forty-five. For many years, I had a very different life. I had what is commonly perceived of as a grown-up life, with a husband and a mortgage and a yard that required regular upkeep. There is much to be said fo
