I think that right now, every aspect of my life could be categorized as “ordered chaos.”

For example, my writing desk: If I want to reach into the printer for my crackers, I absolutely need the crackers to be there, because that is where they belong.  Order.  However, I recognize that most people think that the printer is exactly the wrong place to keep crackers.  So, chaos.

Likewise the commute that, for me, just ended today — two hours of herded crowds and a complete loss of control to the autonomy that is the existence of other people, and it terrifies me.  The kind of chaos that I can’t control and package back up into its Ritz box near the toner cartridge makes me edgy, because I feel so small.

I wonder if that’s a part of why I’m leaving New York.  NYC is the epitome of ordered chaos, and there are singular moments here that are the most sublime images of human perfection because of it — my first day here, even as I dragged a suitcase that weighed as much as I did around behind me in Flatbush, kind of certain that I was about to be stabbed or something, I pulled out my notebook and jotted down:

My cabbie looked like a Bailey School Kids’ book (Genies Don’t Drive Taxicabs?).

I asked for directions and was given answers via gesturing and Urdu.

A Hasidic man helped me to carry my suitcase up the stairs.

A lovely small white puppy sniffed at my flip-flops at a crosswalk.

A row of seven black men sitting on the curb saw me pass and said, “Aw, look at dat cute girl!” (not in a sleazy way, it was endearing, actually.  I am cute.  Like the small puppy.)

I got Syrian take-out for lunch, and organic pistachio ice cream for dessert.

There was a man in a duct-tape hat at the grocery store.
My arrival was well-received, despite my recent paranoia…

And truly miraculously, the strangest thing happened this afternoon: I was sitting in the living room of Melissa- and Joseph’s apartment, reading a book, minding my business, and I looked up and out the window at the cloudcover and bright amber-lit skyline… and from somewhere I couldn’t see, out above my window, some great omniscient nebulous something…
Began to play “Hey Jude.”

I’ve lived more in my writing notebooks than in New York, while here, I think.

I have lived in New York City for seventeen days, and the old adage is true that this place is like nowhere else in the world.  Every minute here has been a rollercoaster that makes me reexamine all of the facets of my personality and weigh what I thought were my strengths against what I thought were my weaknesses, and realize that neither were as concrete as I had thought.

Every day here feels like three days, three acts: morning, afternoon, night.

Mornings I slip onto the Uptown subway with the maids and Estee Lauder girls in their pearl earrings and black lace headbands on our way to the Upper East Side for work, the posters on the train in the morning read in Polish and Chinese: I can read the term for “On 9/11″ in Chinese now.  There are ads on the trains that advertise 9/11 healthcare for those without health insurance.  I deboard the train into a whitewashed world where everyone drinks $7 cups of coffee and slips their uniformed dogwalker a $20 to take purebred Muffy all the way to Central Park.  I’ve had a $7 cup of coffee.  It tastes the same as a $2.95 cup, only the caramel tastes like it’s real.  I’m the only person who enters my office without designer clothes or platinum jewelry.

It’s interesting to be in a real newsroom.  I see: A figurine of the Kung-Fu panda, a phone I don’t know how to use, expensive water, and the cast of Gossip Girl waiting around in the corner to speak to someone.  I hear: Six-figure salary writers debating how to spell “they’re.” Even here.

In the afternoon I haunt Manhattan: the Village, SoHo.  The first time I went to SoHo… I have never felt envy like that.  It was a bright, hot, heavy, all-consuming cloud that bound my lungs and forced ice into my stomach, my eyes welling up with dark pressure in the back of my head, I have never been so jealous of anything or wanted anything so badly as that misty afternoon in half-light in SoHo.  In the Village everyone is young and thin and cool, and it reminds me of Knox in a way, only with less of a need to overdo and prove itself.  And everyone has a keffiyeh and a puppy.

Nighttimes I tend to go to midtown, Herald Square, Times Square… there are no squares in the Squares.  There’s never really nighttime in Times Square; it never gets dark, only gray, and the sidewalks are always wet and shining and steam rises off the street.  We skulk in the gleaming streaks of light beneath four-story faces of Shia or Joe and Nick and Kevin or Rihanna in our Argentinean scarves and Carmen Sandiego trench coats, Shiseido makeup from the counters at Sephora as we creep to the backstage doors to meet Daniel Radcliffe and Ed Westwick.

I try not to look up at the sky too much at night in the Squares, but I can’t help it.  Everyone in New York is bigger than themselves.  Everyone in New York is bigger than me.

I think a large part of why I lived through what I could capture in writing here was that whole part where I was technically homeless for ten weeks when I first arrived.  Honestly, ever since, I have yet to feel settled.  All I do here is travel.  I can navigate the subways on a weekend at 4AM even with repairs, and can tell you to the minute how long it takes to get from Whitehall to the Statue of Liberty on the Staten Island Ferry in the rain.  I’ve walked my feet to leather, which might be too much information, but it’s true: When I left Illinois, I was pampered and suburban, and here, I’m a part of the urban poor.

And it may be horrible, but that’s mostly why I’m leaving.

I miss being able to relax and feel settled.  I’m looking for more order in my chaos.  The town I left ran shipshape, or I guess trainshape, because a train came through every six minutes.  It was dependable and comforting, and life was slow and quiet except the whistles.  That’s where I’m returning.

I lived less in my notebooks there, but I still preserved the order (whereas in NYC, I tried to calm the chaos) –

The old man who drives his turquoise-and-white ‘57 Chevrolet around town every Sunday 3:30 chugged by the courthouse right on schedule; I’m always there to see the car, see the man in his newsboy cap circle the arboretum smugly in that beautiful beautiful car.

Trains pass through even more often on Sundays, flowing down the thirty-eight railroad crossings, the whistles singing to each other in a strange tribal language that I don’t speak.  I like the freighters with wheezing long whistles best.

A murder of crows over the white marble theatre swoop and for a moment in my mind I’m Tippi Hedren with my hair piled high; I should have worn a skirt and heels today instead of cuffed jeans and my little red kid shoes.  A murder of crows…

There is no one out on Sunday afternoons, in the campus square or in town, there is just quiet except for my feet schushing through the piles of fallen leaves more precious than gold.

I love the way late Sunday afternoons sound.

I miss the cobblestones, red and slippery, engraved with the name of a long-dead mason.  I miss the rhythmic lullabye of the trains chugging along the raised tracks, singing together; their whistles long and low or sweet and fluted, a sad melody of times forgotten by most of the country.

I miss the snowdrifts of leaves, mahogany and pumpkin with burnt whiskey edges and a sugar snap beneath my feet.

I miss the frosted-glass streetlights on their wrought iron supports, the way the light is soft and warm and comforting in the cerulean blue twilight when I can just see my breath.

I miss the murders of crows.

At the same time, while sometimes it sucked that I have… had… a two-hour commute to get to work, the blessing was that every night that I came home from work, I got to revel in the New York City skyline twinkling down at me.

The man-made constellations of this starless city are one thing I will sorely miss.

My two favorite buildings are the Chrystler Building, with its ornamentian scaled dome like a silver dragon’s tail, and 40 Wall Street, its coppergreen pyramidal spire just matching the Statue of Liberty.  There are buildings in Brooklyn that I can’t name whose lights I like to see as the ferry turns to go on its semicircular route home — the redlit Watchtower, and its oversize clock.

When I lived in Queens, I loved walking home from the DeKalb Street Station at night, even though I was sort of terrified half the time, because there’s an intersection at Stockholm and Seneca, I think, or Stockholm and Cypress, where — if you stop in the middle of the street, which you can, since no cars pass by after 6PM — looking out towards the city, the cinematic portion of the skyline is perfectly framed by two leafy trees, and it is so beautiful and pictaresque that every time I saw it, I wanted to cry.

Moving from here to there is throwing my life into chaos again, with boxes all over and accounts to close everywhere and trying to keep everything straight in my head.  I’m starting to wonder if I’ll find order anywhere…