D & I are currently in a round red house nestled in the bellybutton (or maybe more an upper thigh) of NYState. We’ve met a grouse who has issues with us—perhaps instead just with our automobile, which I suppose said-grouse wishes were electric. Grouse seems fine now inasmuch as it hasn’t tried to block our way leaving the driveway since the first run-in. But grouse or grousing is not at all why I’m on this page. I’m here because I’m thinking about perspective.

During those way-back aughts, for about six months, I visited an elementary school in Rockaway Beach where I was a visiting writer every Monday. I’d take two trains and a bus from my place in Park Slope, Brooklyn, then, one-plus-ish hours later, go sit in the teachers’ lounge for about a fairly long spell before my first class (being chronically early due to a bone-deep worry that I’ll always be late, means I’m regularly hovering just outside for large swathes of time). The teachers rarely talked to me. They weren’t unfriendly but rather more comfortable in their own company and I was a stranger. I totally got it given the enormous amounts of energy they had to expend in their classrooms, I was surprised they weren’t lying prone on the ground, gold stars on their foreheads. They would be in their chat groove, catching up on what they’d done the weekend just passed. Every once in a moon there would be a story about going into the city. There would be a sweep of an arm in the direction of some seeming faraway land and then the story of a show (oy, the crowds), dinner (oy, the cuisine), the traffic (oy, the cars), parking (oy, the cost), and a general sense of how much of the journey was like a trip to Oz that was fun, yet… I’d sit on the well-worn couch thinking Jeez, what’s the point of being near NYC if you don’t actually live in it, go to it on the regular, be in it. At that point in my life, being in my second decade as a NYC resident, I wore my citiness like a badge of honor. That the steady stream of good, bad, ugly, challenging, satisfaction in survival was very much a thing. And it actually was a good thing. My complaints were those of so many others (oy, the crowds, the cost, the cars, the cuisine). The issue wasn’t the city itself but more my belief that the solution to feeling like a visitor in my own life was to burrow in deeper to my surroundings. Get closer to my, er, what? My truth? My real life? My future? Solutions? For what, I wasn’t even sure. I suppose I was looking for the questions as much as for the answers.

Distance of any sort at that point suggested separation, which terrified me. Geographically, leaving NYC would mean untethering and floating freely into space, a place that had no boundaries where I’d float&fly and possibly bounce off rocks or maybe disappear into a black hole. I really truly did not know.

It’s not like I eventually did know in some flash of realization what the next move should be, that’s the funny thing. It was more that over time my grip loosened around the idea of being in control of where I was physically and emotionally. It wasn’t a totally conscious thing, this letting go, more that I think my emotional fingers got tired of gripping. Or my head started hurting for the depth of burrowing so that I couldn’t see the possibilities outside my immediate space. At the time, NYC was meant to be my forever-Oz, which I was proud of. The if-you-can-make-it-there sensation of life. And I still stand by and am a 100% owner of that pride. The difference is that now I can see a few things from a distance. I’m not grouse-bragging like those Rockaway Beach teachers, nor staring at my life’s skyline with the wonder of those Rockaway students who would point toward the city as if it were a place filled with candy and Ninja Turtles. My view has a more give-and-take vibe. I gave, I took, the city did that too. My life’s doing that too. And now, sitting in this round house surrounded by fir trees and a lawn patched with snow, no people in sight, a grouse possibly muttering in the bushes, I can feel that a view is a fine thing.

I don’t feel untethered as much as unattached from the big shadow-casting expectations that drove my life so hard back in that day. I’m not altogether flagrant about what’s next. Not strictly flying a whatever attitude as much as curious about what’s next. Considering options. Taking the time to stare into the distance without needing to move immediately toward what’s there in order to grab and grip it. The day after we got here, we were at a local diner (exactly as you’re imagining it would be in an upstate NY town) and parked some ways away behind a house was my dad’s car. Not literally, but still, a white four-door Honda. There he was suddenly beside me, which was wonderful and also throat-catchingly poignant. Comforting and disorienting all at once. Sitting in a cracked-leather booth where so many had sat before, looking out at something that both was and wasn’t there, taking a sip of coffee and appreciating the view and my heart and the ability to stay a little still.