forever twenty-one

I just read Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That, where she details a long, consuming, painful disillusion with New York.

I wish Joan had called spoiler alert before she plowed on with her essay, because in a few months I will start a life there, at twenty-one years old, the exact same age Joan started her disastrous love affair with the city. Twenty-one. It’s a special number. Joan was right in picking twenty-one.

Twenty-one is when you are steeped in youth and aware of its fleetingness at the same time. Twenty-one is when your number of romances is still in the single digits, but your number of escapades is sure not to be. Twenty-one is standing on the precipice of a cliff, when all you have known is the arduous and steady hike to get up here—surviving parents and high school—and all you are about to know is a long, suspended freefall, after which you land in a world of bills and mandatory pantyhose.

I supposed this is why New York appeals to the twenty-ones. It doesn’t promise quality living, or good living, or even decent living. It simply promises possibilities. Until one day the tape begins to replay itself. Until the possibilities symbolically run out when you overhear the same man complaining about his same domestic problems with his same damn wife. Then you got yourself a real problem.

You charge into New York and the beginning of the end of your youth, wanting to figure life out. You find so many unknowns you think bare skimming is an acceptable practice. You think that if you come across what you’re looking for, you’ll know and you’ll stop. But what if you reach the end without once having applied the brakes? Somewhere, you had already seen where you were supposed to be, when you were supposed to be there, and what you were supposed to become—it's just that you tossed it before you knew. You look at the piles and think of all the re-cataloguing that need to be done. And you worry that when you finally re-find The Thing, you might be too late, too worn, too old.

Hours. Afternoons. Years. Even while we seem to have it all, their edges already appear in the horizon. And here is what New York represents to those of us who don’t yet know better: permanent youth. New York is twenty-one preserved in a jar. So we pack our bags for New York, hoping its youth serum will diffuse into our skin. But alas! Joan Didion needed only four pages to tell me this is not so. She is right, of course. But I still wish she had called spoiler alert.

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