To Be Tethered

A story of forgetting from where I'd come

The Guggenheim on a busy Saturday in November.

Three months after I moved to New York City, my mom came for a visit. It was early November, the cold slowly dawning on the city like a frostbitten sunrise. In hopes of escaping the weather, the first thing on our agenda was a visit to the Guggenheim.

With its all-white exterior and sloped, swirling halls, the Guggenheim is, in and of itself, an artwork. Sure, the priceless art on the walls might be the main attraction, but the building that houses them is just as much of a thing to be looked at, appreciated—ogled, even.

My mom’s college degree is in fine arts, and her favorite thing to do is roam museums. She knows things about artists the way I know things about authors. She can look at a painting and say, “Oh, that’s Monet,” the same way I can read a paragraph of prose and know, “Oh, that’s Faulkner.” She’d last visited the Guggenheim in her early twenties, just after marrying my dad, back when they lived in Oyster Bay and took the train in to visit the city.

The featured artist during our visit was Vasily Kandinsky, a Russian painter known for pioneering abstract art in the nineteenth century. He just happened to be one of my mom’s favorite artists, so she took great enthusiasm in explaining what she knew.

While climbing the museum’s sloped halls, we passed a cafe on the third floor. It was about to close, so we poked our heads in. “It looks so peaceful in here,” I said, looking around at the marble tables, the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park’s reservoir. It smelled of fresh coffee, the sound of beans grinding and light chatter humming in the background.

“Peaceful enough to get some writing done?” my mom asked, looking around. I smiled gently. “Yeah, probably,” I said. She knew all I’d been craving recently was a place to call my own, a place that would motivate me to write.

In a rash, youthfully made decision, I moved to New York City immediately after graduating college. I had no job prospects, just an online graduate degree to complete. Living in New York had been a lifelong dream, so it felt like then—that blissful space between youth and adulthood—was the time to make the leap.

When I arrived in the city, I was met with a lot of challenges. Any cross-country move to a brand new place will bring its fair share of issues, but at twenty-two, naive to the ways of the world, I was shocked by its difficulty. I’m a generally optimistic person, someone who romanticizes everything, down to the grime-covered tiles at the subway stations.

This idealization of my future was my biggest enemy. I walked around the city, feeling nothing but complete disappointment at the massive skyline before me, the one that had failed to be as dreamlike as I’d once hoped it would be.

When this disappointment hollowed me out, rendering me incapable of writing, I began searching for a place that made me feel safe to wander with my words. I was in the middle of working towards a graduate degree in creative writing, so I quite literally needed to be able to write.

This must have been why, on our way out of the museum, my mom stopped at the counter and insisted upon buying me a membership to the Guggenheim. “I want you to come here as often as you can,” she said. “I want you to come here when you just need a peaceful place to write.”

So, on my days off work, this is what I’d often do: I’d leave my Greenwich Village apartment, and with my breath clouding outside my mouth like a puff of smoke, walk seven blocks on salted sidewalks to Union Square Station, down the dirtied steps, on to the 4 train where I’d head uptown to 96th St. When the train clambered to a stop, I’d disembark and rise from underground, head swimming with ideas, fingers itching to flip open my laptop, to watch sentences grow and shrink before my very eyes. I’d enter the museum, show my membership card, climb the winding slope to the third floor, where I’d step into the cafe and stare absentmindedly at the menu for a few moments before declaring the inevitable: iced vanilla latte, please.

Settling down at a table, I pulled out my laptop, its surface covered in stickers to ground me, remind me of who I was and where I came from. You were not always a foreigner, I’d tell myself. You were not always a stranger in a strange land. You came from somewhere, and you belong somewhere, too.

I looked out the windows to the reservoir. The sky was the color of stone that morning, the clouds on strike. The few trees were barren, the water was a dull brown. On the street below, walkers were bundled in black, calf-length puffer jackets, with waterproof boots on their feet and beanies atop their head.

A young couple strolled into the cafe, pausing near my seat and blocking my view. They weren’t there to sit, just to gaze. They carried warm paper cups of coffee, both dressed in impeccable style. I took note of the woman’s long, sleek black hair, topped with a simple black beret; her calf-length, oatmeal-colored coat, a white and black plaid scarf wrapped around her neck; the chunky black boots she wore under her baggy white jeans.

The guy with her seemed vague, quiet. He was tall, handsome, cut, his jawline sharp as scissors. His stature was elegant, his posture important. He wore long, straight pants, tan colored loafers, a cream Henley button up with a gray shirt underneath. His hair was that nondescript sandy brown color, flopping over his right eye indifferently.

At first, both were quiet, staring out at the water. For a brief moment, with their bodies silhouetted against the skyline, the reservoir and a blank sky stretched out before them, they resembled a still life painting. Transfixed, I could not move, could not type. I watched as the man broke the silence. He leaned down to the woman’s ear, whispered softly, something I couldn’t understand. Her response was slow, but clear.

“I’ve never felt tethered to a place like that. I just haven’t felt permanence like that in… a long time.”

They walked away. I sat there, left to digest her words.

Tethered.

I’ve never felt tethered to a place like that.

My thoughts began to do what they do best: unwind from their tightly wound spool, uncontrollably bumping down stairs, twisting and turning corners. Tethered. Being tethered to a place. I felt sad for this stranger, wounded for this woman and by this woman, who mused that she hadn’t felt permanence in years. That feeling, to some degree, was increasingly familiar to me.

Maybe this woman’s life was transient. Maybe she truly never settled anywhere, never had the chance to make friends or know people in one place. But I have. I’ve known what it is to tether yourself somewhere. I’ve called a few places home, built a community from scratch more than once in my life.

Being tethered is knowing you have at least three people you could call in case of emergency. At least three people you could trust with your house key. It means you know which restaurant is good for what occasion, and find yourself mindlessly craving your favorite dish from that Mexican place on a Tuesday night. It means to be able to drive most places without your GPS, to know how to find your way out of a wrong turn without the help of a map. It means that, if one day you were to leave, you’d always have a place to stay. It means that you have memories safely stashed in tables for two all across town, stowed away in the backseats of cars, ghosts of friendships standing in driveways.

Being untethered is not having anyone local to call in an emergency. Wondering where you’d seek safety if you got into a bind. Not feeling at home even in your own house, feeling anxious no matter where the commute leads—to work or home or dinner; a constant fog of angst. It means trying at least five new Mexican places in the span of a few months, and none of them make enchiladas just the way you like it, just the way that one restaurant back home made them. It means being afraid to make a wrong turn, or take the wrong train, because you’re not sure where it will leave you and how you will find your way home. It means not knowing where you’d stay if you were ever to return for a visit. It means finding yourself adrift on an average Tuesday in May in some glittering skyscraper in some nondescript cubicle, looking at that picture of your family pinned to the gray felt.

Moving to New York, my tethers loose and untied, did nothing but remind me of the tightly secured knots that I spent years tying in previous places. And that act—the untethering and re-tethering—is exhausting and painful. I spent my days hunting for hints of familiarity. I would walk around the city, AirPods in, listening to the same songs I listened to in college. The music felt like lying down next to an old friend, simultaneously sighing in relief. I’d trek forty blocks uptown for the nearest Chick-fil-A, wanting to taste the one thing that felt akin to home. At night, I’d sleep in a silly black nightgown with stars and moons and suns all over it. It’s childish, it’s stupid, and it’s from Walmart, but me and three of my best friends have a matching set. I would wear it and imagine one of them falling asleep in the same nightgown, too.

I stared out the window, out to that bleak landscape. A feeling crept through me, slow and sure: I left a place where I had friends, family, and community, giving it all away for the glimmering hope of what might be. I am my own handler, I am the one who picked up the rope and led myself into this abyss—I am the one that allowed my own heartache to unfold.

I stood, tucking my laptop back into my purse, taking my coffee with me. I walked slowly up the sloped curve, staring at each one of Kandinsky’s paintings as if they’d suddenly come to life. As I tried to remember what my mom said about Kandinsky’s technique, I passed a painting I remembered loving: a smaller, white-framed canvas, with green, rolling hills, a little red-roofed building hidden behind a cluster of trees. The sky was blue, and purple, and yellow. Landscape with Rolling Hills, 1910.

What did my mom say about the painting? About the abstract shapes, about the trees that looked as if they were slightly swaying in the breeze? About the layers of color in the grass? I couldn’t remember, but I wanted to.

To my inexperienced eye, the shapes seemed to jut like elbows, the colors seemed to hurt your eyes if you looked for too long, the landscape seemed to blur and sway and lean in on itself. The only way I could make sense of the painting was by trying to imagine myself in it. If I squinted hard enough, I could visualize myself traipsing a slanted green hill underneath a purple sky, coming home to that red-roofed home in the quaint countryside.

I realized then: that is how I saw New York before I’d moved. As a painting—a giant, moving, always evolving work of art that I, too, could enter into. Abstract, colorful, and promising. As the vague figures moved about, I saw an opening, and somewhere in the muddle of color, there had to be a place for me, a spot to slide into, a night sky to sleep under, or a silhouette of city buildings to blur into.

I was spending all of my time walking around, looking for a place to tether my rope, when I already had tethers tied strong in other cities.

I knew, in my heart of hearts, that trading familiarity for the unknown could be good, could allow for growth and change and maturity. I’d experienced it myself. But just then, as I stared at that slanted landscape, my eyes welling with tears, all I wanted was my mom and a plane ticket back to my hometown. And I wasn’t sure if the re-tethering was all that worth it.

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What I’m Currently Reading:

• Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford

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What I’m Listening to:

• “In From Japan” by Madison Cunningham

• “All I’ve Ever Known” by Madison Cunningham

• “Common Language” by Madison Cunningham

• “The Gold - Phoebe Bridgers Version” by Manchester Orchestra, Phoebe Bridgers

• “Mama’s Boy” by Dominic Fike

• “Details in the Fabric (feat. James Morrison)” by Jason Mraz

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One Thing I Want to Share with the World Right Now:

• Last weekend, my boyfriend and I were in Georgia and took a day trip to visit Augusta. Neither of us had been before, and we found this adorable book store, The Book Tavern, that I believe is fully worth a pit stop if you happen to find yourself in or near Augusta anytime soon.

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