The Summer the World Turned Blue
“I know some stuff about art,” I say into the rain soaked Georgia evening. “But not about much else.”
The night is unusually cool for June, so my friend Jacob and I have hastily pulled on jackets for one last walk before we leave for the summer. City Market, a courtyard in the center of downtown where tourists and locals alike come to stumble into each others arms, is sputtering around us like a tea kettle. It’s nearly 1 in the morning when we find our way into a pizza shop where the benches are sticky and the plates are paper. We talk about girls and we meditate on our freshmen year of college, a year that blew through our lives a little faster than either of us are comfortable with.
Ten months gone. Nine classes. Eight Sunrises. Seven sculptures. Six friends in a circle. Five paintings. Four essays about books I didn’t like. Three tattoos. Two storage bins. A thousand rough sketches in a notebook I already lost.
Sure, I know some stuff about art. But not about much else.
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The next morning I head out of Savannah with nothing in my backpack but a bible and a prayer book. In all honesty, I find that kind of funny. I look out the airplane window and I can almost see the summer itself arrive on the horizon, bringing with it the usual sense of possibility that accompanies these months. When the days are like this, long and warm and inviting, you could be anything you’d like. Maybe even a person who opens that bible. Maybe a person who never looks at it again.
I touch down in Boston and rush easily into my mother’s arms, hair curlier than the last time she saw me, neck sore from the airplane seats. I transition soundlessly back to a life of fresh loaves of challah and “do you have any laundry to add?” This home isn’t mine, and the futon in the dining room that I sleep on is a good reminder of that. But it’s mine enough, good enough, here enough, love enough. I can’t complain.
+
I find myself on another airplane by the end of June. I’m going to Chicago for the first time since we left, for the first time since I packed my clothes into boxes and watched our couch get loaded onto a moving truck. The snow was up to my knees that day, and the notorious Chicago wind was cutting through my chest.
I’m greeted at O’Hare by the humid midwestern summer that is talked about far less but is all the same types of agitating. As I wait for my car outside the airport, I see a Rabbi I used to know in middle school.
“Hi,” I say to him. He doesn’t remember me. “You probably don’t remember me.”
“Hi,” he puts out his hand to shake mine, his face confused.
“Moshe Herst,” I say, summoning a version of myself I abandoned in a courtroom when I turned 18. If the blazing sun wasn’t enough to make me dizzy, then hearing that name come out of my mouth definitely was.
“Ah, of course,” he says, suddenly a look of disappointment I’d forgotten I knew so well. “Nice to see you.”
“You too,” I nod. As I walk away I think about my tattoos, my hair, my posture. I’m happy he didn’t recognize me. I’m happy all this change is visible.
Those five days in Chicago are not satisfying or cathartic like I hoped they’d be. I’m quickly reminded of how few friends I’ve kept, how claustrophobic I’d felt here, how small such a big city can be.
“I feel like you became all these things,” my best friend accused me on our first phone call after months of silence. “And you left me in the before.”
I looked up into the southern palm trees that night and thought she couldn’t be more wrong. But now, looking down on the sidewalk where I had my first kiss, I wonder if she had a point. I wonder if all this change could’ve happened had I stayed, had I kept the pieces of my life intact. I wonder if it’s possible to become without shedding, to create without destruction.
I walk all my old routes. The way to synagogue. The way to the grocery store. The way to the park. The way to my mother’s office. The way home.
But that last one isn’t there. Not for me, at least. I see a father emerge from the side door and get in his minivan, a scene that certainly never occurred when we lived here. He pulls out of the driveway and doesn’t look twice at me. I’m not even sure he sees me at all. I stand on the sidewalk and look across the front yard through the kitchen windows. There’s a wreath on the front door, the door we propped open in the summer to get a breeze through the living room, the door that always gets a little jammed, the door with chipped paint and a broken handle. My chest starts to constrict as I remember the intricacies of this structure that, in the middle of the war zone of my childhood, had been something closer to a sanctuary.
The day my mother brought us here for the first time, when I was seven years old, I walked in awe across the sun bleached hardwood floors. I ran my hands along the white walls and squinted before the massive glass window in our living room. I opened closet doors and scanned the empty shelves. I marveled at the endless backyard. In a moment of true communion, I knelt to my knees in one of the upstairs bedrooms and brought my lips to the carpet.
But it’s not mine anymore. I turn away and walk towards the park, letting the afternoon sink into evening. I’m enveloped by the inky blue sky that I spent so many years staring into, begging, searching. It’s not mine anymore, either.
+
I arrive in Brooklyn as July begins its leisurely stroll through the summer. The city is simmering, a heat that encroaches on the east coast like a noxious gas. I climb up the subway steps and into the whirlwind of my sister’s life. Miriam just moved here from Washington Heights, skillfully exchanging one existence for another, like we were taught. She’s finding her footing in this borough, and I’m here to help her start over, to christen this new person she’s becoming.
The last time I walked these streets I was thirteen years old. My father brought me here to the Chassidic headquarters so I could get a blessing in the office of our movement’s leader, a Rabbi who’d died before I was born but who’s tired eyes and wiry beard I knew well from the photos in our home. I was pudgy and shy, my suit two sizes too big and my black hat threatening to slip down over my eyes. It was a brisk November weekend, and the leaves blew across Eastern Parkway in a hurried shuffle.
Today I pull my suitcase behind me and wipe the sweat off my forehead. I’m taller, with no yarmulke, with nothing to tie me to these people except my hooked nose.
+
Boston threatens to strangle me in my sleep. I find solace in a little glass pipe and in the quiet streets that become navy after sundown. As 10:00 turns into 11, I push the cerulean curtain that covers the front door of my mother’s apartment aside and tiptoe into the evening. I sit in the park and get high, watching the streetlight above me flicker on and off. I walk down Harvard Street and see the students who’ve stayed for the summer make fools of themselves in the moonlight. I know what it feels like to be on the other side of that velvet rope, to think tonight is truly the most important night of my life. I’m the wind, I want to scream. I’m a ghost. I’m a tourist. I’m a lie.
One August morning I’m standing in my underwear in the living room folding laundry. I just bought a new pair of jeans, a dark wash denim that I threw in with all my other clothes after wearing them for a week. I notice the indigo dye has spread. My white undershirts are now sky blue, powder blue, my-mother’s-dining-room-chairs blue. My dress shirts are teal blue, cobalt blue, Cape-Cod-beach-at-dawn blue. I put down the clothes and go retrieve my white sneakers. The spots where my hems rest have been stained too. Speckled blue, ocean blue, fading-bruises blue.
And all of a sudden I’m crying, and I have no idea why.
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I find time for one more trip to New York before summer ends. Miriam’s signed a lease and moved her clothes into a basement apartment. She’s hung pictures on the walls and is beginning to assemble her life along with her furniture. I take notes, preparing for the day I turn the key to my own home, to a place that can't be taken away from me.
We gather up her new dishes to take to the mikveh, a basin of rainwater that will purify the kitchenware. Miriam recites a blessing and dunks the first plate, passing it from her right hand to the left underwater to ensure every inch is covered. I remember the story of Achilles. I think that if his mother had done what we just did, she could have made him invulnerable. But maybe she knew something we don't. Maybe she knew that no amount of holy water or ancient blessings can ensure the future. Maybe she gave her son the best chance she could, and it still wasn’t enough.
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I sit in Central Park with my sister Ariella and her three daughters, a tornado of a group with more stories and thoughts and discoveries than I can keep up with.
I crouch in the grass with my niece to help her collect these weeds-she-insists-are-flowers, and I’m filled with a sudden and overwhelming conviction that there is nowhere else on this earth that I should be. That an infinite number of missed calls and delayed trains and tiny heartbreaks have all been working in collusion to bring us here together.
“We need some pink ones, too,” she says to me with two tiny hands full of dandelions.
I couldn’t agree more.
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Boston Common is lush and green. I look up from my copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. People are lounging in the grass and on the benches, enjoying the breaking heat and the final days of August. The setting sun cuts through the trees to shine on my neck, a golden light that urges me forward like a mentor, like a parent, like a father. I feel the breeze run across the grassy field and curl around my back, whispering into my ear that maybe it’s not too far fetched. Maybe I can write essays like the ones in my hand. Maybe I can have an apartment with a bedroom and a study. Maybe I can drink coffee in the mornings and wine in the evenings and wear dinner jackets to dinner and shave with a fresh blade every day and buy new books once a week. Maybe I can ask for all the things I want. And get them, too.