Where We Can Never Go

There are things we can't see until we've left and come back time and time again.

20 years ago I was a bike messenger in Boston, and the summer before I moved to DC, I took a room in a house just north of Harvard Square.

To call it a house is generous. It was two story tower of sticks, with floors like old trampolines, shoe-horned into somebody's back yard and covered in the yellow vinyl-siding that strangles Massachusetts like an invasive species.

I moved into the apartment on the ground floor, just 3 bedrooms, a tiny bathroom and an unnaturally large kitchen. The guy on the lease I hadn't met yet. I'd been going through the other roommate, an impossibly tall, lanky, and friendly Harvard grad student with a penchant for wool.

One night, after I'd been there for a few weeks, the 3rd guy came home at 3 o'clock in the morning. He was returning from Russia, wearing wrap around sunglasses and a long black trenchcoat, and the first thing he said to me was "Would you like some horse meat?"

This was Victor, big and brawny with short black hair, and over the next few months he and I and Nathan and Victor's small-engine-genius type Ukrainian friend would sit around in this freakish kitchen, taking bong rips and drinking vodka.

Victor told insane stories about Alaska, where I'm originally from. But the Alaska he knew was up a different long-ass dirt driveway than the one I knew. While I've got stories about LSD or shotguns, Victor had stories about LSD and shotguns.

One night Victor looked at me and said, "I feel sorry for you, because you can never go to Alaska."

And he's right. Before all my family left Ak, visiting was always a whirlwind of responsibility and nostalgia. I still can't go there without getting mired in the past.

There are things about Alaska that I can see that Victor never will. And things he can see that are invisible to me.

While Alaska defined me, it was a place where Victor could define himself. He could go to Alaska and feel the freedom it offers to become someone new, whether they be villain or hero. Alaska was for him a place where he could be his biggest self. For me, in AK, I'll always be constrained.

But even though I could never go to Alaska, I could come to New York.

And I came late enough in life to appreciate it in ways that the native born can't. There's just something about being here that you really only appreciate if you've spent years trapped in dusty, desperate towns. In New York, you can see this revelational joy on the faces of immigrants and visitors from all over the world.

There are things where we're from that are hidden from us, that we can only see by going outside and coming back, again and again and again.

Thankfully, in New York, that just means going out of the apartment, not leaving the whole ass state.

More soon,

Dan Flag