1.
I often dream of running away. It involves a frantic chase and my aerial escape where my feet become metal wings that wearily push me to the sky. I struggle in the atmosphere, kicking air until, like Icarus, I fall to the ground and suddenly I am awake, lying face down on my bed in New York City on a July 25th.
The day is starting anew. This world moves fast, and only with this free fall can I catch up to what eludes me. I insist that this is liberation; some may call it “letting go.” I try to outrun my thoughts because thinking too hard is my ultimate demise.
I put on my black slacks and black blazer, slip on my black kitten heels and catwalk my way to the Union Square station. The humidity is viscous enough to hold my weight if I were to fly. Instead, I sink deeper into the underground, shuffling my way onto the 6.
It’s a scene of loud anonymity. I could shout my name and no one would know it. I wonder if it’s all make-believe, and if everyone is only pretending that they don’t care. And I wonder if this indifference is freeing or lonely.
I arrive at the office a fifteen minute ride of passive silence later. I toil away with a plastic smile until my fingers melt into the keyboard and my upper and lower jaw clench into one. The human body can do miraculous things, including sitting twenty hours a day in a Herman Miller chair. Dozy-eyed, I start dreaming of a vacation in Stockholm.
I spend ten weeks at a desk in Manhattan that feels like an entire decade because Einstein said that time moves slower the faster you move. I’m not chasing meaning—just gasping for air, struggling not to drown in the density of it all. All I have left by August is the same indifference that I’ve now decided is more lonely than freeing.
2.
And did you know that things fall apart? They fall apart like a crack that turns into a crumble, like an I’m holding up that can no longer be. I wake up one morning for my summer in New York to end faster than the elevator’s rise to the forty-second floor. And because my bed in the East Village is mine no more, I escape to the opposite end of the horizon on a direct flight from JFK to Tokyo, where for three nights and four mornings, I am alone.
The Shinjuku station is a labyrinth, and as long as it stretches, I wander. To walk in this maze gives me faux purpose; to walk amongst crowds gives me faux company.
But as I learned in New York, there’s so much pretending one can do. So with neither purpose nor company, my mind darts around like a loose ping pong ball, with nowhere to go. I am absent, dissociating, empty. I am a crier, but I cannot cry. In Tokyo, I learn that the end of the horizon is a dead end.
So tell me, where do I go now? Even multicursal mazes have finitely many paths, and I’m terribly aware I’ve exhausted my last attempts. Every flutter-open of my eyes in the morning is the beginning of a pursuit with no pursuer. I exist, vacuum-sealed in my plastic world. .
3.
In Japan, they call dragonflies “winner bugs” because they cannot move backwards. But what I saw from the window of my grandparents’ living room is that they can also hover mid-air. In swarms, they pause in the sky: a creature destined to surge forward can also hold time in its wings before it falls into the current.
4.
And before the waves can swallow me, I’m paddling to the shore on a surfboard in Rhode Island—I refuse to exist in a lull. The water is cold but its sharpness brings me back to the present.
I’m back in Providence for my final year, and I am now the pursuer, craving the purpose and calm that’s eluded me. But I’m again lost; the shiny things I thought would make me happy didn’t. In my exhaustion, I want to let go, but I’m scared to surrender.
On a whim, I return to yoga, an old hobby, at the studio five minutes away. The instructor encourages me to find purpose in the stillness of my body. I’m finally given permission to stop.
The white noise in my head clears, and I can focus purely on the flow of oxygen into my lungs. The practice of ujjayi pranayama allows me to tighten my throat and find the sounds of the cold ocean in my body.
In Providence, I learn to breathe again.
5.
In her memoir, Alison Bechdel asked what would have happened to Icarus if he didn’t fall.
“What might have he wrought?”
I’ve decided to stick around for an answer. I am no Daedalus, but I am here to make wings that let me fly.
Sole Magazine