And realize
The experience of being a small town kid who grew up in rural Massachusetts (not Northampton or Amherst or those kinds of places and not Cape Cod and not the suburbs but somewhere you’ve never heard of up north where you go to New Hampshire to run errands instead of Boston) and whose parents aren’t musicians, writers, painters, collectors, professors, businesspeople, therapists, lawyers, doctors, or scientists but still like stuff like the music of Ravel, Gershwin, Steely Dan, Pat Metheny, and The Jackson 5, and have read books about the Abraham Lincoln assassination, Catherine the Great, colonial history, and how to be a friend to your child instead of a parent, and who like movies like Goodfellas and Doctor Zhivago, and who take you to New York City once a year to see a show, go the M&M store, the Russian Tea Room, and the big and gone Toys “R” Us, staying at the same hotel every time, and who maybe even sometimes take you to a funeral for a member of your Sicilian family in Bensonhurst (all of you feeling like it’s really the only thing you get invited to Brooklyn to do) who somehow know more about culture than you, even though they only talk to other Sicilians and don’t read, and who, when you get home, engage in hobbies that don’t include exploring the internet to learn about art or music or sex (there is close to no hint that this exists, or, if it exists, that it is right) or making friends in chatrooms but look up cars and Patagonia and hiking Everest and the truth behind the movie National Treasure, and who sits on the back deck surrounded by woods and draws birds, reads bird-watching guides, tries to photograph a hummingbird without its wings moving, gets into survival skills, and builds an A-frame shelter in the woods that lasts for years — even as you, eighteen, move out of your childhood home following your parents’ divorce and see the tarp and twigs and balsam insulation you made still standing behind the house as you and your mom drive away to live with your grandfather for a while — and who doesn’t really have any friends, except one who thinks he can see ghosts and gets mad when you doubt him, let alone friends who actually know about you and believe they are close with you, which you don’t have, which you only find out in your mid-twenties, and who is so self-reliant that you don’t think you need friends, and you don’t need family, and you don’t care that for some reason other kids’ parents are social and have friends and say that dreaded phrase, “family friends,” and have those wonderfully tattered ski passes clipped to their coat zippers (which one time you try to mimic with a crumpled index card) and that it’s always just you three at the dinner table every night unless your two grandparents (the ones your parents haven’t burned bridges with) come over for a holiday, and you don’t question what’s normal and what isn’t, and your greatest solace is to stand in the snow, deep in the woods, bundled up in coat and snow pants, fearing a coyote, and listening to the stillness and how it almost makes you feel like you’re deaf because it’s so loud, and you clear your throat just to make sure you can still hear, and a tree creaks and you realize the only things you trust in this world are the trees and the snow and the leaves and the abandoned barbed-wire fences and the boulders and the birds and the squirrels; being a kid like that who gets into literature and art in their late teens and moves to New York at 23 and hangs out with people whose parents are musicians, writers, painters, collectors, professors, businesspeople, therapists, lawyers, doctors, or scientists, and who themselves are writers, musicians, comedians, designers, and grad students is basically like this: No matter how much you know, think, read, study, talk, listen, kiss, or love, someone will always say a word for a food or type of art or a piece of furniture and you will say, “What’s that?” and they will say, “Oh, you don’t know it?” and you will be embarrassed and remember where you came from and who you used to be, and that you are still that person and these people are not like you; at first you will think they’re better than you, then you’ll think they’re worse, and finally you’ll realize no one is anything and why you thought you came here isn’t why at all and you can’t decide whether you feel lost or free. And you will remember how it felt to trust the trees.