A spacecraft trying to leave the Earth needs to be traveling seven miles per second, or about 25,000 miles per hour, to overcome the planet’s gravity and avoid falling back to the surface.
Scientists call that speed escape velocity, which also describes what I feel I’m attaining as I prepare to leave New York City after a decade. Like a rocket that appears to bounce haltingly in the seconds before it breaks free of the launch pad, I’ve felt this summer the force of a life lived in one place.
In July, when I began the process of relocating to South Africa, I wobbled under the weight of my to-do list. I felt handcuffed by possessions, especially those I needed to inventory, photograph and describe for Craigslist. That’s not to mention the things that had piled up over the years: papers, books, photographs, magazines, Band-Aids, toothbrushes, notebooks, t-shirts, coffee mugs, bottle openers, eyeglass cases, towels, Sharpies, a chess set, bed sheets, receipts, bandanas, magazines, magnets, seashells and business cards.
I’ve encountered a battery of medical appointments and filled out a mountain of forms for a visa. I’ve planned what to pack and ended my lease. I have friends to see.
Leaving also means escaping the pull of the familiar. After 10 years in one home I can pad around in the dark without my eyeglasses and not bash into things. I know how far to turn the knob to release a full stream of water into the shower and how long the sink takes to drain. (I won’t recall wistfully the vagaries of my apartment’s 85-year-old plumbing.)
Outside I navigate largely by intuition. I know the city underfoot sufficiently well that often I can tell where I happen to be by looking at the pavement. I read on the subway until I feel my stop.
You might say New York exerts its own gravitational force. I suppose that’s because I love it here. Especially on summer evenings when cafes spill onto the sidewalks and trees overhang the streets and the neighborhoods become park-like and the parks themselves become the loveliest refuges. Or when I’m riding the subway to Manhattan from Brooklyn on a Thursday night and feel tired in a good way and can read for a dozen stops. I love the newsstands and movie theaters and the bodegas that sell Mexican Coca-Cola. I love the people.
I don’t think one can live in New York and not fear the day that your being a denizen might end. That you won’t be around for the change of season. That you’ll have to give up your apartment. That the dailiness of your life here will disappear.
About a decade ago, I left New York for Nashville. During my year away I felt as if I would never get to live here again. “It seems that the moment you left town they put up a wall around the place, and that you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again,” Nora Ephron wrote in a 2006 essay about moving away. But I later learned what Ephron also knew: you can come back.
Now summer is fading and the tide of my life here is receding. An echo fills my apartment where furniture and books and the clutter of life once absorbed conversations and footfalls. The last time I heard the echo was 10 years ago when I had just moved in and gazed out my window at the Empire State Building. I thought then I was the luckiest person in all of New York to have that view. I still feel that way.