There are No Bad Settings

Only sites where the arrow is lodged

For a long time I couldn’t watch movies set in New York. And there are a lot of movies that take place there. Tax credits and incentives will do that.

I had lived in New York. When I married a New Yorker in my early twenties, well, there was no question. The city was where we would live. On the last MTA stop before the Bronx, years before Lin-Manuel Miranda sang about it, I lived in my husband’s post-war two bedroom. It overlooked the roof of a magic novelty factory. It was an hour to get to Midtown. I started having backaches from carrying so much stuff around. My first month, I begin coughing up black. My then husband’s co-worker joked I was a real New Yorker once the cough stopped as mysteriously as it started.

I worked three jobs, then four: adjuncting at various universities, tutoring middle school students. I was badgered constantly by men: on the subway, in the park. I felt hounded, even just sitting down to eat my lunch or read. But the real thing that badgered me was my marriage, which we had entered into after knowing each other for less than a year.

I learned you can’t rush into marriage, a lesson I took too closely to heart. It would come back to bite me on my next engagement, when I guess I waited too long. What is that happy medium? I may never know it. But I know now New York is not a bad place.

I actually love it. I love going to shows, getting tickets at the last minute. I love seeing my old friends who live there, and eating at restaurants by myself. I love walking around the park and just walking along the streets, engulfed by activity, energy, and potential as soon as I step out the door.

Denver is not a bad place, either, though I feel overwhelming pain when I return there. The site where the arrow is lodged.

Photo by Priyank Pathak on Unsplash

Maybe there are no bad places. There is only grief about what happened there.

It’s hard not to believe it’s still ongoing, behind that door where your key kept sticking and once broke off in the lock, in the tiny yard you worked forever to fix up, to make nice, buying expensive patio furniture, stringing lights, planting herbs. You had to leave that furniture behind. All the plants fell to seed and the weeds grew up, the yard ruined once you left. It turns out you did a better job than you thought at the time. You worked very hard, on all of it, and it took such a short time to collapse.

I’ve known for a long time that grief isn’t linear, but I guess I thought that meant grief as it relates to death. I forgot you can grieve the living too. I forgot people can wound you while they’re still sort of around. I forgot the wound can go on and on, get worse, get infected as more information is revealed. More breadcrumbs I can’t eat.

When I was leaving New York, I started to see its magic, truly see it again. A lot of performers lived in our building—it turned out one of my favorite mystery writers lived on the same block too, though I didn’t realize it at the time. I kept bumping into a musician, a curly-haired guitarist who was Irish. We became friends in the elevator. We did our laundry at the same time. I would knock on his apartment door to return the guitar picks I kept finding in my clothes. Maybe this was or could have been something. So many things I let go, just left alone, because I was tethered to pain.

Place is important to my writing. Place is important to me. I write the most about Ohio because that is where I’ve lived the longest—and I do worry I’m an imposter if I write too much about Colorado, for example, the state I only lived in for three and a half years. Is that enough time to make stories of experience? To search for meaning? What’s the clock on not feeling like an imposter? I don’t know, as I obviously don’t know the marriage one.

But I write about what happened, what happened to me. We all do. For me, that often means place. And the complex feelings associated with a setting, a landscape, a life that someone threw away, left like those mountains that may never stay in my rearview.

A Spell for Process

This week I’m doing a social media takeover of the Sustainable Arts Foundation feeds. Sustainable Arts, which for many years supported writers and visual artists with children, awarded me a Promise Grant in 2015. Though that grant was for my poetry, it enabled me to afford childcare in order to write my first novel. You can read about that, about the inspiration behind my other books, my art practice and process, and see photos of my writing space and special sneak peeks for my next books here.

Sometimes the spell to snap you into motion is to simply see how someone else does it, the patchwork most of us must make of work, life, and grief ongoing.