Llude sing cuccu!

Spring is late to arrive, and late to keep its hold on New York this year. At first I hoped this meant I might escape the allergy season unscathed, but no, it is May 1st, and I am dying. The birds are singing, the peach tree outside my fire escape is slowly exchanging its spring pink blossoms for summer greenery, and I am running on less than three hours of sleep each night because of allergy insomnia. I may or may not be composed of about 74.33% anti-histamine medication right now.

May 1st also means that I have about six weeks left in New York City. Put that way, it doesn’t seem like nearly enough time. Enough time to wrap everything up on my end, enough time to pack, enough time to say goodbye to New York. Six weeks to sell my furniture, six weeks to figure out what to do with the massive amounts of kitchenware I will no longer need, and six weeks to sort through which books I will be taking south.

SIX WEEKS TO DECIDE WHICH BOOKS WILL STAY AND WHICH BOOKS WILL GO.

It feels like an impossible task. I’ve also reached the point in my life where I actually have a stack of books I mean to read but haven’t yet. You guys, for the majority of my youth, I never had a TBR pile. One of my superpowers is reading at the speed of light, and I often finish entire books in a matter of hours. But ever since I started working in publishing, my TBR pile has grown steadily to the point where I’m wondering if I will ever actually get to it.

And now the dilemma. Like the rest of my New York stuff, do I just sell/donate my TBR pile and start afresh? Or do I take it with me to North Carolina on the off-chance I will get around to it? My inherent packrat tendencies push me to the latter, but my pragmatic self is saying GET RID OF IT. But…books! says my inner bookpackrat. But…TOO MUCH STUFF, argues my pragmatic self.

Despite my eagerness to start my life in North Carolina, a part of me is digging in its heels. Bear came into the city this past weekend to say farewell to his friends, and the finality of his goodbyes made the reality of my impending leave-taking all the more…poignant. People ask me if I have a list of New York things I want to do before I leave. I don’t really; for me, New York was never a checklist of things to do. Instead, it was an amalgamation of small neighborhoods and emotions and potential and desire. New York is so big, you can only live in it to find the small pockets of perfect New York-ness. It’s not Broadway, it’s not Times Square, it’s not the Statue of Liberty or anything else that people tick off their list whenever they come.

For me, New York is a series of little moments. Sometimes I capture them as best I can with Instagram.

I will definitely say that there is actually ONE thing on my New York Things to Do Before I Leave for North Carolina:

Enjoy the fuck out of that last bagel. Because there ain’t no “real” bagels where you’re going.

I spent the past couple of days in North Carolina looking at houses with Bear (and we’ve bought one, huzzah!). Down south, all the trees were already in bloom, but NYC is still a little behind the times in terms of spring. Nevertheless, the peach tree outside my fire escape is optimistic. Look! A bud is about to bloom!

A view from the window of my office in the Flatiron the summer of 2010.

Listen to “The Fairest of the Seasons” by Nico.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Now that it’s time,
Now that the hour hand has landed at the end.
Now that it’s real,
Now that the dreams have given all they had to lend.
I want to know:
Do I stay or do I go?

—Nico, “The Fairest of the Seasons”

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for the longest time, and I can’t seem to press publish. When I was younger, the desire to be heard and read and validated was an overwhelming compulsion, but the older I get, the less need I feel to share myself with the world. The world grows smaller with each passing year—smaller, but deeper—and I am well-content to be my own echo-chamber, my sphere limited to my closest friends, my family, Bear, White-Harp, and my journal. Perhaps this is what it means to grow older. I’ve become more private, more introspective, more selective.

When I was younger. It’s a hard thing for me to say, either in print or in person, being as I am still young. I’m 27 years old, almost 28. At heart, I feel so much younger. But I have lived a multitude of lives in just under three decades, and I have lived more fully and completely than many others three decades older than me. Despite my years, I have grown old. Or perhaps it isn’t that I have grown old; it’s that I have grown up.

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

—Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”

I was 18 when I first arrived in New York, 18, fresh-faced, and newly-legal. It wasn’t the first time I had stepped foot in the city; indeed, I had visited several times before. But in August of 2003, I was a freshman at NYU, just a little over two months into adulthood, and determined to live in this city of dreams. It wasn’t enough to go to school here; I was going to make a life and make it mine.

I was alone for the first time ever, really and truly alone. My parents and little brother had just dropped me off at my dorm on Fifth Avenue, and I managed to check my tears until long after their car disappeared into the zombie crawl of NYC traffic. In fact, I checked my tears so long they never came, even when my mother later told me that my then eight-year-old baby brother cried as that iconic city skyline slowly sank into the New Jersey horizon in the rearview mirror. I loved my family; I loved them so much that it hurt, but I also loved myself more.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.

—E.B. White, “Here Is New York”

If you had asked me at that moment–that moment when I was 18 and alone for the first time in my life—just why I had chosen to come to New York, I wouldn’t have been to tell you. I would have made a pithy joke about Sesame Street, or perhaps even Sex and the City, but would have been unable to articulate that deep desire, that unvoiced need to be here. Right then. Right now.

I was in love. I was in love with an idea, not of a city, but an idea: a vision of a future self in a garret, an unmade mattress on a hardwood floor, empty cartons of Chinese takeaway, stacks of well-thumbed paperbacks, and a fire escape overlooking the rooftops and water towers of the buildings below. (The only thing to ever come true was the fire escape. And oh, all right, the empty cartons of Chinese takeaway too.)

Ostensibly I was in New York to study; I was matriculated at the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University, a Presidential Scholar, and a not-yet-declared-but-really-who-are-we-kidding-there-was-no-question English major. But the truth was I didn’t care about school; school had only been an endgame to this, to that moment where I stood on the 14th floor of Rubin Hall with two enormous duffelbags stuffed with the last remnants of my childhood. I had always been an excellent student, but I would never again care about grades, a fact that would be borne out by my middling 3.54 GPA, as well as the fact that I graduated a full year early. No; I was at school not to study, but to live in New York, and the sooner that began, the better.

Funny now how things seem to come full circle. Everything began at that moment, that first year I was in New York. It was the year my roommate introduced me to Ani Difranco, to the Slackers, to Nico, to this very song that I now listen to as I write this post. It had no meaning for me then, and yet it is inextricably tied up in who I was then. I can’t help but be 18 years old again when I hear it, 18 years old and playing Nico on my laptop speakers as Sarah (soon to be Eliza) and I sat with our backs to the other, working on our respective papers, but sharing and communing at the same time. It was the year I first read E.B. White’s “Here is New York” in my expository writing class, it was the year I wrote my first expository paper on that very essay, it was the year I was told that I was a real writer. It was the year I first read Joan Didion in a creative writing class, and it was the year I became JJ.

It seems weird to think about it now, the fact that I’ve only been JJ for a decade of my life. Until that moment, I was Sarah, the name I had been given at birth. It’s still the name of my childhood self, the name of someone’s daughter, someone’s little girl. I had had a handful of nicknames growing up, but none had ever really stuck. My dad had always called me a variety of names, from Gertrude to Knucklehead to Killer, and my grandmother had sometimes called me Sarah Jane (not my actual name—Jane is not part of my name at all) and Petunia, but it was only with the birth of my little brother that I became something new for the first time: a big sister. I was christened Noona then, the Korean word for “older sister” (if you’re male), but that was only a name for what I was to someone else. Not who I was to myself.

In high school, the English teacher most responsible for expanding my mind, my soul, my self, used to call me “The Great Miss JJ”. But then it was something special that belonged only to him, and to the blossoming young woman I was becoming. I was still a schoolgirl then, and unready to be the woman I was going to be. But at that moment I decided to be who I was going to be, and that person wasn’t called Sarah; she was called JJ.

Of course, the decision wasn’t made so easily at that moment, or so consciously. In fact, the decision had arisen from necessity. My roommate was also named Sarah, and there was yet another who lived on our floor, and in order to distinguish ourselves, my Sarah and I took on other names. She became Eliza; I became JJ.

(And here I am, ten years later, living with yet another Sarah. Life happens in cycles, it seems.)

I grew up in a large metropolitan city; in fact, I grew up in The Other City, in Los Angeles, California on the West Coast of the United States. People often ask me why I left. Those for whom the world never feels too large and too small at once would never understand the compulsion to leave. I love LA; it is home. But I also love the LA of my childhood, not the LA of my adulthood. By the time I was 18, my home had grown small, both within my own room and within my city boundaries. “There’s nothing here to thrill or bring you down,” Hedwig sang on my car speakers as I played over and over again the soundtrack to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I was ready to leave.

But it was also because I didn’t want to grow to adulthood in Los Angeles. I used to tell my friends that People come to LA to be found. It’s true. How could it not be? In a town of tinsel and sunshine and Hollywood and glamour, it is a city that draws people who need to be seen. But New York? New York is a place where people go to find themselves. I didn’t need to be seen; I needed to be heard, and the only person who needed to listen was me. And I couldn’t do that in the land of perpetual summer and roses and canyons and night-blooming jasmine; I had do it in a city of subway cars and honking horns and shouts and 4AM salsa music up in Washington Heights.

And so I did. I came to this city to find myself, but maybe it wasn’t to find myself (I’ve always had a good grasp of that); it was to grow up. As my decade in New York City draws to a close, I find myself mourning. But I don’t grieve the fact that I am leaving; I mourn the loss of my younger self. I mourn the loss that punk-eyelinered girl in her ripped up fishnet tights, black tutus and ratty old Chucks, the girl with a black fedora tilted at a rakish angle as she smoked clove cigarettes outside an underground rock club at 2AM in Brooklyn, before Brooklyn was expensive, before it became tame. I miss being young and decadently reckless, irresponsible, careless. I miss the girl I thought I was going to be at that moment, when I was 18, standing alone in my dorm room in Fifth Avenue.

I still am that girl. But she no longer clamors to be heard; she’s had her say, and has now retreated into the depths of who I am today. Still there, lurking beneath the surface of my skin, waiting for her moment to come back out and play. And she does, but before long it is time to put our toys away, to fold herself back up into neat creases, and back into the drawers of memory. I am not her anymore, even as she is still me. The acknowledgment of that hurts. It hurts, but it also feels right.

With that acknowledgment also comes the knowledge that my time in New York has come to an end. In truth, I had always known my time in this city had an expiration date. The vision I had had at 18 contained only myself, room for one and none other. It allowed for lovers, for the mayflies of attraction that came into my life before spending their life in a few awkward fumbles on my pallet. I used them, I discarded them, I took them for what they were to me then: inspiration. Fodder. I ate them and their lives to fuel my own writing. I was cruel, but not maliciously so. I was a solipsistic, self-absorbed creature, untouched by concern for anyone or anything else. I was Peter Pan, “gay and innocent and heartless”, and I did not yet know how to grow up. I was not ready for the “next great adventure”.

Bear came into my life rather earlier than I had expected, or even wanted. I was 20 years old, only two years into being gay and innocent and heartless and free. Love frightened me, still frightens me, for I had ever been a self-contained, solipsistic creature. I do not want to love. I do not want to grow up. So I didn’t.

I stayed in New York long after Bear had moved on from it. And I loved it. I had the safety of his arms and the warmth of his protection, but I was (still) careless and reckless and irresponsible. I was single, solipsistic, and I could bear to have him in my life because it was on my own terms. But this too, I knew, had to come to an end. There would come a moment when I would have to face the fact that my New York vision had no room for another person in it.

It happened slowly, insidiously. Instead of a garret, the room in my mind was slowly being replaced by a house. Instead of empty cartons of Chinese takeaway, I was starting to see a cozy French kitchen. Instead of ratty, thumbed through paperbacks, I was starting to see built-in shelves and a library. Instead of an unmade pallet, I was starting to see a hand-carved sleigh bed. But more importantly, in that room in my mind, Bear was there, always there.

I suppose I should have known it sooner. The death knell of my time here sounded even before Bear received his Match down in North Carolina (back in January—urologists are speshul—and yes, I’ve held on to this news for a very long time). It was when I was home in California over Christmas break last year.

My parents’ dog, Tuxedo, AKA my Other Little Brother.

It gets harder every year to say goodbye to my family. The tears I did not shed when I was 18 now come full force. Part of it is because I love my family so much it hurts, but the other part is because I’m reluctant—more and more with each passing year—to come back to NYC. It had grown hard. I don’t know when that happened. Once I relished the difficulty, believing that because I worked at it, living here was all the more worthwhile. And for a time, it was enough. The romance of living here was enough.

When did it not become enough? I don’t know. But it wasn’t a sudden thing, a thief in the night. But perhaps because I knew, but couldn’t admit to myself, just how hard it would be to make that House in My Mind a reality here. I wanted and did not want that vision to come true. I wanted it because it was right, but did not want it because I didn’t want to feel like I was giving up.

It feels like a betrayal of New York City to say I’m ready to go. It feels like I’m breaking up with a long-time girlfriend (although, to be fair, I’ve never had the dubious pleasure of breaking up with anyone) whose life is on a different path from mine. It doesn’t mean I love her any less. I still love her a great deal. But she’s not right for me, not anymore.

A house. A car. My Bear. A grown-up life. At 18, I would have disdained those things; at nearly 28, I welcome them. And I welcome North Carolina. I relish the idea of opening up the next chapter of my life to a blank page. New York taught me that I was an adult; North Carolina will teach me how to be one.

Yeehaw.

Now that I smile,
Now that I’m laughing even deeper inside.
Now that I see,
Now that I finally found the one thing I denied.
It’s now I know:
Do I stay or do I go?
And it is finally I decide
That I’ll be leaving
In the fairest of the seasons.

The buds on the peach tree (formerly The Tree of Indeterminate Stone Fruit) outside my fire escape are trying so hard to bloom. I feel ya, Peach Tree. I feel ya. It’s hard to remember spring is coming when it’s 35 degrees.

Other factors for my blog absence include: blog fatigue, the feeling that I’ve run out of useful things to say without having to repeat myself, the other feeling that perhaps blogging itself has become passé, my love affair with Tumblr because it doesn’t require me to come up with original content, and the fact that my original content is now reserved for the awesome Publishing Crawl, etc. A lot happened for me in 2012, but the majority of it didn’t make it into this blog.

Still, I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t include at least one “best of” list. Most of my reading was for work, but I managed to squeeze in a few for pleasure. Not many, but a few. Unlike last year, I legitimately have an actual Best Book of 2012, and those of you who follow me on Twitter can probably guess what it is.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

My GoodReads review is short and sort of says nothing at all, but it does aptly sum up what I feel about Code Name Verity.

I cannot get this book out from under my skin.

As far as books go, I tend to read for intellectual stimulation rather than emotional gratification–that is, personal identification is not necessary for me to enjoy a book. I would rather be amused or impressed than satisfied or satiated, so I tend to prefer books that are more about Ideas than Feelings. Barring that, I would rather read a book that is commercially plotted and paced because I am much more interested in What Happens than How the Characters React Emotionally. And even if I do personally identify with a protagonist or character, I’m usually able to distinguish between what I feel about a book and what I believe are its literary merits.

Not so with Code Name Verity.

I could, like so many others, illuminate its many fine literistic qualities: its clever reveals, its authentic historical voice, its structure, etc. but when I think of Code Name Verity, I don’t think of it as a great literary work (although it is); in fact, I don’t think much at all. I am lost. Ich bin verloren. I am utterly consumed by FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELINGS.

Ironic, considering how often I rail against FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELINGS–especially FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELINGS at the expense of GODDAMN COMMON SENSE–but perhaps this is why I am a sucker for those who love despite all reason. Because I do. Despite my pragmatic brain, when I love, I love wholly, irrevocably, completely, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the flaws. If I am not outwardly demonstrative, it is because I do not know how to articulate the depth of what I feel, and therefore do not try. Hence the brevity of my initial review of Code Name Verity.

But now, at year’s end, I shall try. I shall try.

‘Tis indeed a miracle, one must feel
That two such heavenly creatures are real.

Earlier this year, I wrote about three movies I loved, and one of them was Heavenly Creatures, a movie that destroys me in much the same way as Code Name Verity. In my review of the movie, I wrote about what I called my One and Onlys.

I formed intense bonds and friendships with other girls. I had a string of One and Onlys growing up, girls with whom I shared not only interests and hobbies, but my heart and soul. We were sisters in all but blood, but even better than sisters, we were the same. Girls with whom I made up fantastic worlds and stories, girls who were my firsts in almost every single way.

Where Heavenly Creatures explored the dark side of the One and Only, Code Name Verity is about the utter opposite. If Heavenly Creatures was about the point where affection turns into co-dependence and love turns into mutual paranoid obsession, then Code Name Verity was about the selfish and selfless acts we do for the other because we love.

It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.

It is. It really is. If there was just one line from Code Name Verity that sums up the entire book, it is that.

I’ve never much cared for romance; I’ve always thought it silly and ridiculous, even as a silly and ridiculous young girl. I hate being wooed, and hate even more this absurd notion that the pinnacle of Love is romantic love, that happiness with a romantic partner is the Be All, End All to human existence. What tosh, and I say that as someone who has happily (and rarely, but sometimes, unhappily) been with her Bear for over seven years.

Sarah J. Maas, author of Throne of Glass, once wrote the most beautiful and moving love letter to her best friend Susan Dennard (called Sooz), author of Something Strange and Deadly. In it, she touches on the very nerve that thrills whenever I read Code Name Verity (and I’ve read it several times this year already): that friendship completes us. That of all the loves that exist in this world, friendship is the most pure, the most selfless, and the most rewarding. Long after romantic relationships end, long after your family is gone, your friends are the ones who stay because they love not out of attraction (romance) or obligation (family), but free will. Love given of free will is the sweetest.

Not enough books celebrate this, and even fewer books celebrate female friendships in particular. We are subjected to endless “bromances” and movies glorifying the ideal of “brotherhood”, but so often female friendships are denigrated as trivial, petty, or even unimportant. Female friendships often take place on a more domestic scale, it is true, but when tested, I would wager their bonds are just as strong as any “band of brothers” you might find, and Queenie and Maddie prove that in spades.

Best Books of 2012

• A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper
• Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore
• Froi of the Exiles by Melina Marchetta
• Seraphina by Rachel Hartman
• The Cabinet of Wonders by Marie Rutkoski
• The Crown of Embers by Rae Carson
• The Diviners by Libba Bray
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• The Peculiar by Stefan Bachmann
• Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan

As you can see, we have my perennial favourites (Rae Carson, Libba Bray, Sarah Rees Brennan, all three of whom made my list last year), but other trends appear to be that I am on a(n alt) historical and/or high fantasy kick. Three of this year’s reads were straight up historical (The Diviners, A Brief History of Montmaray, and Code Name Verity), and two more were alt-historical (The Cabinet of Wonders and The Peculiar). Four were high fantasy (Bitterblue, Froi of the Exiles, The Crown of Embers and Seraphina), a record high for me! (Actually, this year was filled with TONS of great high fantasy, but I couldn’t pick them ALL to include on this list.)

New additions this year were two middle grade titles (The Cabinet of Wonders and The Peculiar). I love middle grade, but I don’t often read them as I tend to read YA for research as much as for pleasure. (Unfortunately, St. Martin’s Press does not acquire middle grade…yet.) Only two men on this year’s list (John Green and Stefan Bachmann), and surprisingly, not a single adult title.

A pretty good reading year for me, in contrast to 2011, where it felt as though I struggled to find books I loved. I think we’ve finally moved past the infernal dystopian trend in YA–I’m hopeful historical and high fantasy will make a comeback, and based on my list, chances look pretty good.

That’s it! What were your best reads of 2012?

September 4, 2012
Children’s: Young Adult
Adi Rule’s debut, SING, about a young soprano who enrolls in a remote music academy where nothing and no one, not even her mysterious young vocal coach, are as they seem; and a second novel, REDWING, a dark modern fairy tale, to Sarah Jae-Jones at St. Martin’s, in a two-book deal, by Ammi-Joan Paquette at Erin Murphy Literary Agency (world).

So…yeah. I bought my first two books. :) I AM SO EXCITE, PEOPLE.

What? This is what I like to watch as entertainment.