Moving to New York: Do It for the Plot
We’re hardly the first to do it.
Nothing made us move to New York. No life-changing opportunity called us across the country. Life hadn’t gotten stale in Austin, either. We weren’t stuck in a rut, banging our heads against the wall. We had it pretty great.
We just drifted here. As if we were sledding down a mountain and a clearing in the trees opened up to one side, so we just shifted our weight slightly, tilted the sled a few degrees, and completely altered the course of our lives for the next several years.
Deciding to leave Austin was a bigger deal for me than it was for her. Carolina had already made the big moves. Leaving Puerto Rico for Georgia after high school. Leaving Georgia for Texas after college. I’d spent months in other states, other countries, but each stay had an expiration date. It felt like pulling out the line on a retractable leash, knowing Texas would draw me back again. This was different.
I’ll miss Texas. It’s taken me 27 years to truly feel like a Texan. I think it’s natural to be embarrassed of your own upbringing for a while. To feel like your birthplace doesn’t define you the way it does other people. But then one day I realized: Willie Nelson is cool as shit. Big Bend is pretty cool, too. HEB tortillas. DJ Screw. Being Texan ain’t so bad.
We spent three months saying goodbye to people. Every time we hung out with someone I tried to note the specifics of that last encounter, as if it was some important historical event that needed special remembering. I fixated on small details. The music that was playing, the table we sat at, Sasha’s outfit, Jacob’s latest obsession, Reagan’s screenplay idea, the smell of my dad grilling, the sound of my mom’s voice. I got a little too sentimental, especially since I’d be seeing most of these people again before the year was up.
Carolina has less trouble with that kind of thing. She successfully maintains relationships with friends and family all over the world. There are people she hasn’t seen in six years who she considers close. She has a longer view of things than me, I’ve learned. She sees a complication as character development. A healthy part of any interesting storyline.
This move brought us up against many of these complications, and our go-to encouragement for each other became, “do it for the plot.”
We’re pressured into leaving our Austin house miles better than we found it, to scrub each baseboard and between every floor tile or risk losing our entire deposit. Do it for the plot.
The New York apartment of our dreams has an old-fashioned landlord who demands we either fly out to meet him in person or withdraw our application. Do it for the plot.
Turns out the landlord doesn’t like us, so we have to move out by the end of the week with no place to live, put everything we own into storage and crash with family and friends. Do it for the plot.
When we managed to find an apartment and sign a lease, everything stopped. We sat on our hands for a month waiting to move in. Texas became a special kind of hot. Like being covered head to toe in plastic wrap. Like your skin can’t breathe. There was a lot of anxiety in those weeks. We stood sweating in front of our storage unit playing mental Tetris, trying to figure out how to get it all into a trailer.
The actual move happened fast. The UHaul was only ours for 6 days. We had to pick it up in New Braunfels, transfer everything over from our storage unit, and make a three hour dent in our road trip all in the same day.
We stopped in Dallas, hosted by a close friend of Caro’s. Someone she loves dearly but sees rarely. She blew up an air mattress for us to sleep on. In return, I disabled motion smoothing on her TV.
We worked on our laptops for half a day, then drove across Arkansas. In the quiet between songs, I started to hear a faint scraping sound coming from my back wheels, barely audible over the road noise. I tried to convince myself it was nothing and turned the music up. We checked into a La Quinta in Memphis for the night.
We left at 6am and crossed into Kentucky by noon, but it was slow going. If my car’s RPMs stay high for too long, the warning light for my transmission oil temp comes on. So I had to slow the car down when going uphill. And there are quite a few hills in the Appalachian Mountains.
A nightmarish storm came out of nowhere and reduced our visibility to about twenty feet. I pulled my chest up against the steering wheel and drove with white knuckles and clenched teeth for an hour.
In Jackson, Kentucky, we stopped again and stayed with yet another one of Carolina’s beloved long-distance friends. They reminisced about their college days. I drank too many margaritas and started laughing too loud.
The last push was the longest one. By the end of the day we would drive through six states—a miracle to a Texan.
Kentucky was the most beautiful. Early morning fog seemed to leak out of the ground and through the trees, making the ancient mountains even spookier. West Virginia was the hardest drive, my poor car limped up the hills as best she could. Maryland had the prettiest sign, but we missed it on the highway so I pulled over in the welcome center to get a good shot of it. Pennsylvania had the most corn. And just when we thought that must be all of the corn, there was more corn. New Jersey had the weirdest vibe. We stopped for gas there and I had to let someone pump it for me, and that felt funny. Like letting someone tie my shoes or lift a fork to my mouth.
Then, just after sunset, we officially crossed into New York. And the city welcomed us with bumper to bumper traffic.
Moving to New York might be the most stressful thing either of us have done in our entire lives. We spent months with hair triggers, where any minor inconvenience could send us into a rage or a depressive spiral. Luckily, we managed to take turns with our episodes. Leaving one of us to steer the ship and comfort the other. The snacks. The back rubs. The episodes of Bob’s Burgers. We carried each other here with small kindnesses and quiet, tender moments in the middle of mass hysteria.
At one point while packing we found some weed my sister left us a while back. That also helped.
It seems like a lot to go through for a place we might not even like. But that’s just part of the deal, the gamble of new experiences.
I nearly passed out carrying the 60 some-odd boxes up to our third-floor apartment. We had some of the best pizza we’d ever tasted half a block away. The good and the bad, we’ll take it in stride.
We’ll do it for the plot.
