Hello new visitors. It’s quite possible you’ve found this site because of the Newsweek article. If you haven’t already read it, I recently wrote about 10 Cities/10 Years for Newsweek’s “My Turn” feature, which is a space for people to share their unique life experiences. In the article, I discuss the details of the project, what I learned about myself through doing it, and what I learned about America in general.
It was an honor to write for the feature and I’m quite pleased how the article came out. You can read it here:
City living is a great way to be reminded that America is uniquely complex, that there are millions of Republicans in “blue” America and millions of Democrats in “red” America. One of the silliest notions I’ve ever heard is that there is a “Real America.” According to many politicians, because I grew up in a town of less than 80,000 people, I’m from “Real America.” This concept, that “Real America” exists in the heartlands of the country, outside of our main metropolises, led me to wonder: What does that make the over 15 million Americans I lived among, in big cities, from 2005 to 2015?
After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, I heard frequently about the “liberal bubble,” but that never fit with the country I experienced. In the cities I lived in—many considered liberal strongholds—I met all kinds of people whose views fit more neatly in the “conservative” box. There was the transgender woman in New York who adamantly defended the U.S. government’s use of torture on terrorism suspects after 9/11. There was the co-worker in Nashville who assumed, because I am an atheist, that I “sacrificed” children—her interpretation of abortion. For that matter, there were all the residents of so-called liberal cities who went to church every Sunday. I encountered all types of political and religious views over my 10 years; rarely did they fit in an easy category.
If you’d like more background on what exactly the 10 Cities project was (and continues to be), there’s always the About section. If you want to read some stories from the road, you can check out “The Book” section (scroll down and start with the Prologue). You can also check out other Press coverage. Or just take a look around the site; you may stumble across something I’ve totally forgotten I wrote.
Whether you’re a regular reader of this site, someone who used to be a regular reader and is just checking in, or someone who came across 10 Cities/10 Years because of the Newsweek article, I’d love to hear your thoughts: on the article, on the project, on life, on the 1962 Chicago Cubs, whatever. Leave a comment, show some love.
Cheers from Madrid,
L
P.S. Anyone who is interested in keeping up with my ongoing adventures, including my life in Spain and future publications, can add your email address over on the righthand side.
P.P.S. If you live in Madrid or are going to be in the city in mid-October, I’ll be doing a talk about the project and my writing at The Secret Kingdoms, a recently opened English-language bookstore in Barrios de las Letras. Get tickets here.
I’ve been known to indulge in my share of excavating. As I prepare for my next big move, I’ve been looking back, not only on the decade-long 10 Cities/10 Years, but also on my youth and even more recent history. Writing these chapters from my life has been rewarding, allowing me to scrutinize my memories and re-examine pivotal moments in my history, recontextualizing my history as it relates to my present. But there are other ways to explore the past.
One of my favorite tools for documenting my life in real time is Last.fm, a website I’ve mentioned not infrequently in these pages. It’s the simplest of ideas: the website tracks the music you listen to on your various devices and compiles that information into charts and data points. It’s extremely nerdy and entirely unnecessary, and I love it.
I started using Last.fm just a few months before I set out on my decade of travel, so I have a document of all the music I listened to throughout the entire journey from day one: my ups and downs, my relationships come and gone, my periods of depression and moments of hysteria, all of it soundtracked. It’s the kind of thing that I can nerd out over for hours, and often do.
I decided it would be informative to look at my Top Songs charts for the various years of my 10 city project to get a sense of the tenor of each year through my musical obsessions. I’ve taken a snapshot of my Top 5 tracks, so now, if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to take another look back at my project, this time through song.
How predictable. In my first year of traveling, I was still mostly listening to the artists who had gotten me through college, so Radiohead and Rufus Wainwright had been getting heavy rotation for a few years by this point (and still do). “Fake Plastic Trees” was my go-to favorite song for years, though its stature has diminished some over the years.
In terms of evolving musical tastes, The Decemberists were one of the many new artists a friend introduced to me while I was living in Charlotte. Especially in those early days, the Pacific Northwest band was known for their whimsical and eccentric mix of British folk and sea shanties. I was besotted with “The Engine Driver” which has this one verse:
I am a writer, writer of fictions I am the heart that you call home And I’ve written pages upon pages Trying to rid you from my bones
It’s the kind of melodramatic sentiment that I absolutely adored back then. (Eh, still do.)
Not much had changed in terms of favorite artists, though I was definitely listening to a more varied selection. “Come Pick Me Up” is my all-time most listened song and has never lost its “Favorite Song” status, but by this point I was starting to seek out more obscure artists. Mirah was another new discovery from my year in Charlotte, and she rapidly ascended into the realm of favorites. Though I’ve only followed her career intermittently recently, I was fortunate enough to see her play live just a few months ago at an intimate benefit show for LGBT youth. She was lovely.
Ghosty, for those that don’t know, is (was?) a band from my hometown in Kansas. They played a set at the famous World Café in Philadelphia and I saw them perform. Staying after to talk with the guys, I was surprised when the lead singer said that he actually knew me because he had seen me read poetry back in Lawrence. That was wholly unexpected and kind of cool.
For a time, Beirut was the musical artist I felt most spoke to my increasingly disparate tastes in music. I used to say that if I had any musical talent (I do not), I would make music exactly like Beirut. It’s interesting how, as especially so-called “indie” music has expanded in form and genre, the once unique Baltic sounds of Beirut have become just another common trope. I still enjoy Beirut, but my fervor has lessened considerably.
Starting to see some more female artists gain prominence in this list, though none of these three particular artists would be in my favorites. Still, Beth Orton’s Central Reservation did receive considerable play for a few years. “Concrete Sky,” which is off of a different album, features one-time Orton beau, Ryan Adams, so that probably helps explain its high chart position here. It’s also just a beautiful song.
“No Children” is, for me, the perfect song about a doomed relationship, that kind of love where the two people are terrible for each other but still work in a twisted sort of way. John Darnielle is a storyteller, and the entire Tallahassee album is arguably the best novel he’s ever written (though his two actual novels are worth a read).
My fifth year was, at times, arduous, as you might recall, so it’s not really surprising that the songs that got the most airplay in that year were in large part downcast affairs. I adore Neko Case’s entire oeuvre, and I consider her song, “Star Witness,” to be one of the defining songs of 10 Cities/10 Years (I’m frankly shocked at its absence on these lists). Although “Don’t Forget Me” is a Harry Nilsson cover, she definitively makes it her own.
Yeasayer’s “Tightrope” stands out from the other songs on the chart with its propulsive and infectious rhythms. It appeared on the Dark Was the Night charity compilation (along with Iron & Wine’s “Die”) and was basically the standout track from two discs of excellent but mostly similar sounding indie rock and folk music. Worth tracking down.
In the wake of a bad break up in Chicago, Nashville’s list consists of a lot of old favorites; comfort food, I suppose. Ironic that the one Adele song that I was really into that year was actually one of her more upbeat tracks. Also, “Dear Chicago”? How on the nose could I be? (Granted, it’s a fantastic song.)
Ryan reclaims the top track, but this time with a song that was never officially released. Both “Karina” and “Angelina” appear on the famously unreleased 48 Hours (bootlegs are available, obviously), which was scrapped in favor of Demolition, a solid but ultimately less cohesive album. I’ve said this elsewhere but, after Heartbreaker, 48 Hours is Ryan’s greatest album, and the fact that it has never officially been released is a tragedy (a few songs appear on Demolition). “Karina” is his most sympathetic and piercing character piece and deserves to be loved by millions.
Otherwise, this list clearly reflects the counter-intuitively sunnier times I was having in Seattle. Also, funny to note just how much Childish Gambino has evolved as a writer and performer since those early days. “Freaks and Geeks” is still a banger.
This was another hard personal year, but still a year with a lot of partying, which is nicely exemplified in the dichotomy of Justin Timberlake and a pair of The National’s bleakest songs. The Divine Fits’ “Shivers” splits the difference, an old school proto-punk cover with the lyrics:
I’ve been contemplating suicide But it really doesn’t suit my style So I guess I’ll just act bored instead And contain the blood I would’a shed
Considering my state of mind that year, the song was clearly speaking to me. (The song also includes one of my all-time favorite lines of shade: “My baby’s so vain / She’s almost a mirror”.)
I’d been a fan of Death Cab for Cutie since college, and yet, somehow, I had never bothered to acquire their most critically acclaimed album, Transatlanticism. I rectified that in Boston and soon after became enthralled with the eight minute centerpiece. I was also still obsessing over Hurray for the Riff Raff, a folk/mixed genre band from New Orleans that you should also be obsessed with. Get on that.
(Also, yes, Justin Timberlake made the list two years in a row; no shame.)
And then came Brooklyn. Kanye West is an asshole. Kanye West is too full of himself. Kanye West lacks impulse control. All true. Also true: Kanye West can produce some amazing music. When Boston roommate, Emily, helped drive me to my tenth and final city, “Power” literally started playing the moment we passed the city limit sign. There couldn’t have been a more thematically appropriate song for that moment.
I had a brief fling with a French girl when I first moved to Brooklyn; my infatuation with The Stills’ french-language “Retour a Vega” lasted much longer. At the same time, I fell absolutely head-over-heels in love with HAIM’s debut. Their latest release is very good, but I still play the hell out of Days Are Gone.
Goddamn right JT threepeated.
Album Credits
Notably, while many of my favorite artists are represented in these lists, there are plenty of others that don’t appear (no Sufjan Stevens, no Elliott Smith, no Spoon, no Rilo Kiley), while a number of artists who I barely listen to anymore (Night Terrors of 1927, really?) showed up.
I could have done this kind of list with my Top Artists or my Top Albums and gotten some very different results. For instance, these were my top albums from my year in Charlotte:
All five albums came out between 2005 and 2006, yet only one, Picaresque, is represented on the most played songs. I suspect that I was still getting to know these albums and thus listening to them straight through instead of just cherry picking my favorite tracks.
I chose to look at my top songs instead of albums or artists because I think they reflect my moods in those years more accurately. The album lists lean heavily towards recent releases, and my top artists stay pretty static from year to year (Radiohead and Ryan Adams are almost always in the top spots). By contrast, my ever-changing top song lists across my ten year journey illustrate not only an evolving musical taste, but they also provide insight into my mental state in those particular years.
Perhaps this sort of thing is only interesting to me (if so, you probably aren’t still reading, so who cares), but if you have a Last.fm account, I recommend taking a gander into your own past. Maybe you’ll learn something about yourself.
Epilogue
For the completists in the continually dwindling crowd, I’m including my second and third year lists from my time in Brooklyn. As I’ve written about previously, the music of Songs: Ohia carried me through a very difficult post-project year, hence The Lioness charting so many tracks. And then, this current year’s list is a result of my concerted effort to seek out more diverse artists and voices, in particular more women.
Brooklyn (Year 2)
Brooklyn (Year 3)
Ideally, the list will continue to evolve every year because I will continue to evolve. In that way, these charts serve both as a document of the past and a challenge for the future. Who knows what my playlist will look like after a year in Spain? I look forward to making fresh comparisons next August.
[Some names are real, some are changed, and some are made up because I don’t remember their real ones. You can guess which is which.]
I was leaving work when my phone buzzed: a text. It was Megan.
“You want to get drinks?” It read.
~~
Two months prior to this evening, I was employed at Sound & Vision, a used CD/DVD store with two locations in downtown Philadelphia, one on 2nd Street and the other on South Street. Separated by less than a mile, when I needed to bounce from one store to the other, I frequently took a scenic stroll past Penn’s Landing.
I began working there in June, only a few weeks after departing Charlotte. The job involved sifting through stacks of mostly unlistenable CDs while blasting Neutral Milk Hotel over the stores speakers or staving off boredom by watching movies on a 13″ television. For a 23-year-old new to the city, it was almost the perfect job. Steve, the owner, played the role of Almost.
A man more horizontal than vertical, Steve had spent his entire 50 years in Philadelphia but looked no less road worn for it. He rhapsodized frequently about his past accomplishments and justified his current, not-quite-estimable status by blaming any number of villains: Past employees, city officials, his baby mama.
I suspected, however, that his decline in fortunes might fairly be attributed to his crack addiction. That, and his weakness for companionship. Prostitutes aren’t cheap; although, his did appear to be on the, shall we say, more economical side.
As Steve’s extracurricular activities took precedence over managing his stores (and paying his employees, and bathing), he charged me with finding someone to cover the shifts he was no longer interested in working himself.
One of those interviewees was Megan. She was a petite, mousy girl with an almost perfectly round face and hair so thin and matted down, she gave the impression of someone just a couple months out from finishing chemo treatment. Other than the aforementioned baby mama, Donna, the staff was all male, so I recommended Megan to Steve who, with all the vehemence he could muster, said, “Fine.”
After that, I rarely saw Megan unless there was a problem. The stores could operate with one employee at a time, and as the de facto manager (a role I had essentially forced Steve to bestow upon me), I took all the hours I could get.
When I did cross paths with the other staff, we shared our latest stories on Steve’s erratic behavior.
“He came into the store with a hooker and emptied the till.”
“He called me up, yelled at me, and then started sobbing.”
“He smells like a homeless man, if that homeless man ran back-to-back marathons.”
With Steve growing increasingly unhinged, the responsibility of running the stores fell to me, even as I knew no employees were being paid. Some of the newest hires – including Megan – still hadn’t received a single paycheck. I received promises almost daily that we would be paid “the next time I come in.” But one afternoon, I noticed an ominous bill in the pile of mail. Holding the unopened envelope to the light, I could make out the words “Past Due” and a number with five digits before the decimal.
On what would turn out to be my last day working for Steve, I arrived before noon at the South Street location. Megan was to work at 2nd Street that afternoon; it was a normal Sunday.
A few minutes after I opened South Street, Megan called in a frenzy.
“My purse was stolen.” She had opened the store, set her bag down on the counter and gone to the back for a moment. When she came back out, someone had absconded with her possessions. Frazzled and upset, she wanted to go immediately to the police station to make a report. I told her I’d have Steve come down and cover the store. That didn’t seem unreasonable. Apparently, I was mistaken.
Steve arrived at 2nd Street in a sour mood, his 4-year-old son and Donna, the child’s mother, in tow. Immediately after relieving Megan, he called me on the store phone and launched into a lengthy diatribe, complaining about our overstock and any number of other grievances. This haranguing continued for a half hour, until eventually his voice began to drop out and his words jumbled together. Then silence.
He fell asleep. Poor guy, apparently all those hookers and blow had plum tuckered him out.
An hour later, I received a call from Megan.
“They’re both passed out.”
“Excuse me?”
“Donna is asleep on the ground behind the counter, and Steve is passed out in the back. He doesn’t have clothes on.”
I had unfortunately had the inauspicious experience of walking in on a sleeping Steve before, so I knew what she was witnessing: A gray-haired, whale of a man, undressed to his skivvies, his gelatin hindquarters squeezed to the point of bursting inside tighty (off-)whities. It was a sight meant for neither man nor woman.
“You have to get out of there,” I insisted.
“I can’t,” she protested. “The boy’s here. There’s a homeless guy in here with him.” Where was Norman Rockwell when you needed him?
Megan did leave, after Donna had stirred, and she came straight to South Street. I was sitting there with another employee who Steve had fired the night before (the employee claimed he quit). He was looking to get paid, and come to think of it, Megan wouldn’t mind the same.
I gave the former employee about $200 out of the till, figuring that was the least Steve could do. I told Megan she should just go home for the day. There was no way she could be expected to work around her half-naked boss (no sexual harassment policy on earth would let that fly). I told them that if Steve contacted them, tell them I gave them permission and they could blame me.
They did. And he did.
When Steve awoke from his power nap, he called again, apoplectic. He upbraided me for giving away hismoney. For an hour, we yelled at each other, I laying out his numerous sins, he venting all the ways I had earned his disdain. Then, with his anger boiling over, he abruptly hung up.
Stewing for half an hour, I paced back and forth behind the counter while the few customers the store had stared at me with concern apparent in their eyes. They’d heard everything.
I called Steve again and quit. Immediately, he turned apologetic and conciliatory. He offered to pay me (most of) what he still owed me. He offered to drive me home. He offered to buy me dinner. I took him up on all of it; then I still quit.
My triumphant exit was slightly undercut by the fact that I had already agreed to cover Megan’s shift the next day. But then that was it.
A few days later, I started working at Penn Book Center and I put Steve and his insanity behind me.
~~
Megan and I had remained in touch, but this was our first excuse to hang out.
“They’re running a crazy promotion. Free vodka from 6-7.”
In those days, I wasn’t yet on the whiskey train. As an inexperienced drinker in Charlotte, I initiated my journey towards noble alcoholism with rum. However, after a few too many nights that resulted in my evening’s drinks reincarnated as vomit, I was looking for a less sweet drink. Vodka, why not?
The bar was somewhere downtown, and that’s about as specific as I can hope to get. When I arrived, Megan was there with a friend I didn’t know. The promotion, – sponsored by Smirnoff, or Skyy, or Absolut, as if it made a difference – was as advertised: From 6 to 7, the bar was slinging free vodka. The three of us immediately lined up and downed a round. And then we did it again. And again.
In between drinks, Megan and I caught up. She had stayed on at Sound & Vision for a month after I left. With the crew diminished, she was catapulted into the managerial role I had vacated. Whereas I had convinced Steve to allow me to take cash from the register when I needed to pay bills and whatnot, Megan lasted nearly two months at the store and never received a red cent. “I quit last week,” she said.
By the time the hour had passed, we had managed four or five shots each, and I, being a vodka-newbie and drinking on an empty stomach, was feeling the warm, Russian comfort in my gut. My drinking companions, being prudent with their finances, packed it in when the free booze dried up.
I, on the other hand, had a full time job that actually provided an income. I said goodbye to my companions and saddled back up to the bar.
All I remember after that was stumbling out of the bar, maybe ten minutes later, just as possibly three hours. Crowds of well-heeled couples were gathered on the sidewalk, waiting for taxis. I circumvented the line and threw myself into the back seat of an unsuspecting cab.
“Where you going?”
“50th Street and Spruce,” I sputtered.
The cab was swirling. The planet was shaking. As the taxi pulled away from the curb, I felt a familiar churn in my core. I rolled down the windows and – well, I’d like to say that I managed to evacuate everything outside the window, but I suspect that was not the case.
“Here you are,” the cabbie said curtly after only a few minutes. Even wasted, I knew he couldn’t have possibly gotten all the way across town.
“Where are we?” I asked, as much a question of location as a metaphorical pondering from death’s door.
“15th Street.”
“No, 50th Street. Five-Oh.”
“I don’t go that far,” he stated in such a way as to preclude debate. Drunk, sick, and wobbly, I paid the protracted tab and stepped out of the cab and into darkness. I was just on the outskirts of Center City, but it might as well have been the woods by Camp Crystal Lake for all I knew.
Now, on top of my inebriation and general wooziness, I was lost in a city I had only lived in for three months. My dark haze had me turned around and unable to figure out which direction I needed to head. Looking about me, I picked a direction and…
Woke up on my lumpy futon the next morning.
This wouldn’t be the last night I would find myself in an unknown Philly neighborhood and somehow will myself home. It was also the initiation of a brief affair with vodka that would last roughly until I moved to southern California and began courting a burly gentleman named Jack.
I hung out with Megan two or three more times after that night and then she just slipped out of my life, like so many other two-month friends I’ve had. Philadelphia, more than anywhere else I lived, was a city I merely passed through, sometimes stumbling. Much of that year set the pattern for the next decade of my life, but when Year 2 ended, there were no tearful goodbyes, no farewell parties.
I was stronger for it: the struggles, the isolation, the city’s coarse touch. I chose Philadelphia for my second year specifically so I could push myself, test my mettle. In that sense, it fulfilled every expectation. It’s why I’ll always have a fondness for that dirty town; even a slight appreciation for Steve.
Still, a month before I packed up all my stuff and moved to Southern California, I trekked down to 2nd Street and saw something that made me smile:
The end of Sound & Vision. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Our last meal together was at Olive Garden. It could have been worse; it could’ve been Chik-Fil-A. In a couple hours, I was to board a bus headed for Philadelphia. My second of ten years was to take place there, but before that, I had to say goodbye to North Carolina. And Ashley.
We had only been dating for a month and a half – hadn’t even known each other for three – and from the beginning it had been established that I would leave, for reasons not entirely clear even to me. That didn’t keep us from soaking up every second together, never apart for more than a few hours. Our instant rapport was built on youthful zeal and fragility, a translucent love that began fading the moment we touched it.
For my last two days in Charlotte, Ashley and I were inseparable. She helped me pack up my apartment, drive my boxes to the post office, and unload the few pieces of secondhand furniture that I owned. With friends wanting to hang out and say their goodbyes, we savored our last, precious moments alone together. Our final night was spent in my spacious but now bare apartment. I laid my one blanket out on the carpet and Ashley slept in my arms.
She volunteered to drive me to the Greyhound bus station, and it was on the way that we stopped for committee-tested Italian cuisine.
A Greyhound bus station can be many things – cold, sticky, desolate, haunted – but one thing it can never be is romantic. No movie builds to the climax of a man swooping into the bus terminal just as his lover is about to give her ticket to the wheezing, septuagenarian driver. Greyhound stations are where stories end, not begin.
We stood in line together, me with a bulging suitcase, a green backpack, and a blue laundry bag stuffed with a cornucopia of my possessions, the draw string wrapped around the wrist of my right hand while my other held Ashley’s. We had arrived early because of her inherent punctuality and now we had a half hour to wait. She couldn’t wait.
My decision to move to Philadelphia, the decision to bind my fate to my10 Cities/10 Years project, had been made before I met Ashley. I suspect if she had come into my life just a couple months earlier, my life would have been very different. I couldn’t know it then, but the year ahead of me – indeed, the decade – would be tumultuous and exhilarating, crushing and beautiful; most of all, lonely.
Ashley was crying at my side, her stoic resolve dissolving with the clock’s merciless ticking. Up to the end, she refused to ask me to stay. Fearing she would, I had briefly turned bitter towards her in our last week together, but she held her tongue. She was young, but wise enough to know better. It didn’t mean she didn’t want me to stay; it didn’t mean I didn’t want to. I am a stubborn man, though. With her tears turning into sobs, I couldn’t give her the one thing that would have comforted her.
She left me then. It was too much to ask of her that she wait to watch me step up onto the bus. She fled back to her car and suddenly it was just me, facing my uncertain future alone.
That’s not entirely true, actually. Standing in the line before me was a young boy, not quite 20 (granted, I was only 23). When Ashley left, he looked at me with a quizzical, unreadable expression, suggesting neither empathy nor embarrassment. His confused, blank eyes looked like he was seeing everything for the first time.
“She okay?” He asked.
“Yeah,” I replied, doubtful.
“She loves you, huh?”
“I…” I was taken aback by his forwardness and also not entirely sure how to answer that question. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Okay.” I hoped that would end the conversation but he soldiered on. “Where are you headed?”
Since we’d soon be boarding the same bus, I saw no reason to not tell him: “Philadelphia.”
“Yeah? I’m going to Pennsylvania, too. My family lives in…” some city I don’t remember, a place that might as well have been Moscow for all I knew of Pennsylvania at that point. I flashed one of my patented half-smile/half-grimaces of acknowledgment, hoping that would suitably express my incuriosity. Typically, I might have engaged in innocuous chatter with a stranger – why not, I had nothing better to do for the next day – but Ashley’s absence was pulsing inside me, reinforcing how drastically uncertain I was of my choices.
“I’ve been in an asylum,” my glass-eyed companion offered without prompting.
Of course he had.
Feeling it prudent to give this boy the opportunity to talk about himself, I offered a simple, “Oh, yeah?”
He talked more, much more, but what he shared about himself I no longer remember. There was only one person on my mind. Was she still sitting outside, crying in her car? Or had she left immediately? Should I call her, attempt to say something comforting? Or would that just make things worse?
Eventually, the boy sensed my disinterest and went silent. Or, perhaps more likely, he had found it hard to maintain conversation with a pillar of salt.
When our bus was ready for departure, I gladly let him board first. The boy picked a seat near the front of the bus and I, avoiding eye contact (even as I felt his gaze on me), headed to the rear of the bus.
I’ve ridden Greyhound buses all over the country. From Kansas to Boston, from DC to Detroit, and countless stops in between. They aren’t pleasurable trips, but can be generally tolerable as long as you procure a few things: a seat to yourself, preferably not near a baby; a sizeable music library; and something to read that won’t give you a headache (magazines or paperback novels are good; Russian literature tends to strain the mind too much). If you’re so inclined, a few mini bottles of liquor can be of benefit, too.
Already drained of energy before we even pulled out of the station, it would turn out to be one of the most grueling bus trips of my life.
Our fully booked bus departed Charlotte midafternoon, due to arrive in Philadelphia in the morning, the following day. That trip is roughly 16 hours, a long haul, but hardly a marathon. The early going was nothing unusual. We made various stops as we progressed up the coast, out of North Carolina and up through Virginia.
When we made bathroom or food breaks, I found myself shadowed by the young, Pennsylvania-bound man. He attempted small talk, but after a few hours on the bus and still raw with emotions, I was in no mood for it. Though he eventually picked up on my unresponsiveness, he still hovered about me, always standing a few feet from me like he was afraid I and the bus would leave without him.
We were scheduled to arrive at the Richmond, Virginia bus station before midnight where I and most of my fellow bus riders were to catch a transfer at 12:30. Instead, inexplicably, traffic outside the city stopped to a standstill. By the time we got through and arrived at the station, it was coming on one in the morning and the bus to Philly was long gone.
The station was bustling with passengers. Apparently a number of delays had riders stuck in Richmond, and for those of us continuing north, we had to wait for a bus that was scheduled to depart at seven. We spread out in the terminal, hoping to find even a few feet of unclaimed floor space to sleep on (it was too much to hope for a free seat).
Even when I did manage to find the bare minimum of unoccupied space, I couldn’t sleep. I had my three bags with me, essentially every possession of any value stuffed into them, and didn’t feel safe falling asleep with so many restless, gray-eyed strangers around. For nearly six hours, I held loosely onto consciousness, but even when exhaustion began to win the battle, my growling stomach remained vigilant. I hadn’t eaten since Olive Garden, and my only options at that time of night were whatever the depleted vending machines had to offer.
Finally, sunlight peaked through the grimy windows and, with it, the promise of my Philly-bound bus. Unfortunately, when you’re sleep-deprived, hungry, and sore, the length of time between sunrise and genuine morning is interminable. As I waited for the departure announcement over the loudspeaker, I couldn’t sit still: I paced, I sat, I stood again; I carried all of my bags into the bathroom and then right back out.
To my great relief, my bus did arrive and in time, I was on the road again.
We pulled into downtown Philadelphia in early afternoon, a quarter of a day later than I was scheduled to have arrived. I still had to figure out how to get from Market Street to my apartment in West Philly. I was in a city I’d never been to before, weighed down with heavy bags (growing heavier with each passing minute), and completely unfamiliar with the public transportation system.
By the time I made it to my new home, I was too exhausted to process that my new apartment – nay, my new room – was barely large enough for a full-sized bed or that the bars on my window warned of a rougher neighborhood than I was accustomed to. I pulled out my one blanket, the one I had shared with Ashley, and laid it out on my hardwood floor. Then I passed out.
That wasn’t the last I saw of Ashley. In fact, she visited just over a month later, and we reconnected a few times over the years of my project. But what I left behind in Charlotte, what I abandoned with her, would never be recaptured again. Of course, it couldn’t: when we separated that first time, we were still in the midst of our initial infatuation. Looking back on those brief few weeks is like peering at an insect frozen in amber: It will remain forever pure.
I will always regret and not regret my decision to leave. I know if I had stayed, the relationship would have fizzled out in time – not because of Ashley, but because of me, because I was still so young and so far from who I would become with the years of travel and experiences. Knowing that to be true doesn’t make the sting of that first move any softer. It was something I had to go through. Loss is a fundamental part of traveling; people rarely tell you that.
Now, when I’m asked how I can move so much, when questioned how I stand to leave behind places after such brief stays, I can only think, “It will never be that hard again.”
When I started, my beard resembled a mess of pubes glued to my face; now white hairs spike out from it (the beard, not my pubes). If you need a less hirsute way to appreciate the time span, think about this:
The best selling album of 2005 was by Mariah Carey. The show Supernatural aired its 1st episode the same year. David Letterman was still on television! (Crazy, I know.) No one had even heard of an iPhone when 10 Cities / 10 Years began.
It’s, quite literally, a different world than it was in 2005.
I’ve been doing this a long time, long enough to feel simultaneously old yet fresh to the world. I’m relearning how to think about life in terms longer than year blocks, but I have no idea what sits ahead of me even a few months from now. I remain, to my core, a stranger.
Currently, I bartend, and I find myself listening with quiet bemusement as people rant confidently, definitively about this nation from the singular, narrow perspective of their hometown. As if the whole world could be seen from one window.
People ask me where I’m from, and I say Kansas, because, yes, technically that’s true. But when it’s said back to me – “Oh, he’s from Kansas!” I hear whenever someone mentions the Midwest – it rings false. “Kansas” (or any small state) is essentially code for “Inexperienced rube.” To city-dwellers it’s quaint; to hippies it’s idyllic. In reality, it was neither.
I grew up in Kansas, sure, but in a more accurate sense, I grew up in the United States. I discovered how to be on my own in Philadelphia. I learned how to survive famine in San Francisco. I found out how to recover from heartbreak in Nashville and then thrive on isolation in Boston. My perspective is not born of one town, one city, one state, but one country.
In that way, it’s still limited. The map is vast and I’ve only explored one corner of it.
Most people define themselves by where they’re from.
For a decade, I’ve defined myself by where I’ve yet to go.
I’m not done yet. My year in Brooklyn officially wraps at the end of August, meaning that there is still 3 more months until this project ends. And even then…
I’ve been writing. I have created drafts of the first 2 chapters of 10 Cities / 10 Years: The Book (not the title). It was in those first cities – Charlotte and Philadelphia – that the foundation of the whole endeavor was set, both in experience and in patterns: Move; Meet; Learn; Love; Detach; Disintegrate.
For much of what I’ve written, I’ve relied on memory, an imperfect capsule. I didn’t start out trying to capture every moment as it happened. I didn’t keep meticulous journals and notes to document my travels or my evolution as I progressed through 10 cities. Instead, I have snippets of remembrances: poetry, letters, rants written down, the occasional diary entry. The fullest details are left to be reconstructed through the loose connections and misfilings of my frayed synapses.
This is how myths form.
How I reassemble this story, as a series of events building up to a decade, will not be how the other participants – those who only appeared for a short time, a year or less, maybe only a month – will remember it. I will tell stories that some people won’t remember at all. I will leave out happenings that others will have believed to be of utmost importance.
The final product will be a version of history. Not history.
Emails
I have taken to reading old emails to fill out the memories. I’m lousy with names, always have been. If I’m introduced to someone, there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll have forgotten the name by the end of the conversation. Part of the problem is that I’m a visual learner. When I see something written down I am 10 times more likely to remember it.
The other problem is I prioritize my socializing: If there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to leave my life and I will never see you again, I won’t put much effort in storing the information.
Now, as I’m sitting down to recount old stories, I am realizing that there are ancillary characters who, though not particularly vital in the grand arc of my story, still played an important role for a brief moment. And their names are mostly lost in a mixture of time, space and liquor.
Thankfully, I was a better documentarian than I realized. It turns out that my aversion to phones (seriously, don’t ever call me) served a purpose: I have written literally thousands of emails to friends and lovers over the years. Sometimes they were nothing more than a single sentence, a brief greeting when I was feeling lonely or I knew the recipient was having a rough day. Much of the correspondence is built on long forgotten inside jokes.
But there are longer letters in those digital file cabinets in which I wrote at length about the events of my days. In one email to a friend, I discussed attending a house party after my first week in Philadelphia. I have no memories of that party, and the letter is short on specifics, but I did list the names of my neighbors: David (the landlord), Phil, Seth and Alexis. None of these people were especially important to the direction of my life, though I did spend a number of nights attending parties and shows with Alexis. Knowing her name doesn’t strengthen my memories of the year, but it does provide a precise detail by which a reader can latch onto her as a character.
It’s these kinds of details that make me grateful for the nearly limitless storage capacity of Gmail. And yet, in those dusty tombs are also the fragments of many lost relationships.
Love Letters
I have never intentionally thrown out a letter or a note from a friend. If it was handwritten, I most likely have it somewhere. Even if it’s nothing more than a Post-it note, it’s likely stored somewhere in my file of papers. When I was a child, I received an odd penpal letter from a boy in Russia (odd because it was in response to a letter I had never written) and I’ve kept it ever since (I never wrote back). There is just something about words written with pen or pencil that hold so much power.
Most of those notes are from old lovers. There are letters of courtship and eroticized notes from the height of romance, but there are also desperate recriminations and sad postmortems from the failing or failed end of a relationship. I’ve kept them all. They are history, not told by the victors, but by the defeated.
In the early goings, when I left a city for the next, I had 1 or 2 ex-girlfriends who were reliable e-companions. I was always trying to stay friends with exes in those days, and so our emails back and forth still included pet names and the occasional admission that feelings had not faded. But we were trying (or trying to try) to be platonic.
There is nothing sadder than an old love letter, except perhaps an old love letter that was never meant to be a love letter. To sit down with the specific intention of expressing one’s feelings in a letter is a reflection of love, albeit a calculated one. To sit down, though, with the simple idea of writing about one’s day, only to be so overwhelmed by your need and longing that you pour out your feelings on the page, well… that’s just love.
And it’s gone.
Ex-lovers move on, as they should. They get engaged, they get married, they have children and they don’t go through their old emails and love letters and reminisce about some phantom to whom they once foolishly devoted themselves.
Well, perhaps they do. Even in happiness and contentment, they must wonder about the past and try to remember how both the pain and the pleasure could have felt so intense. They wonder if it was ever real. They have their doubts. They have their memories.
An Impossible Task
When this decade ends, I’ll string together a through-line from Charlotte to Brooklyn, attempting to assemble a cohesive story out of 10 disjointed, directionless years in which I spent as much time trying to forget as I did remembering. I’ll piece it all together with love letters, emails, notes on scraps of paper, photographs and, most importantly, memories. Yours and mine.
It will be a lie. It will be a myth. It will be a kind of truth. Like a love letter.
10 Cities/10 Years 