Unscattering
A very personal essay // the long view, past and future
One day you're there, and then all of a sudden, there's less of you. And you wonder where that... part went; if it's living somewhere outside of you. And you keep thinking maybe you'll get it back. And then you realize, it's just gone. — Peggy Olson, Mad Men S2E13, “Meditations in an Emergency”
Now they’re deforesting Russia, exhausting her soil, turning it into a steppe… If a man of hope were to appear and plant a tree, everyone would laugh: ‘Do you think you’ll live so long?’ — babbling side-character in Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent
I tell people, for the sake of convenience, that I live in Philadelphia. It’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. Sure enough, my apartment is in Philly, and most nights I lay my head here. But the places I see in my dreams have very little of Philly in them. Most often, a person or place makes its way into my dreamscapes only once it’s been a part of me — and I a part of it — for years. It takes time for things to steep into the subconscious. Philadelphia is now my home, but only has been for seventeen months. So, no, it’s not quite right to say that I live here. Because much of me — perhaps most of me — exists elsewhere.
I was born in Angola, a tiny rural town in the northeastern corner of Indiana. In our modest ranch house on Springhill Drive, my mother nursed me in the same rocking chair from which I’m now typing these words. From as early as I can remember, I was best friends with Charlie, who lived four houses down. When a neighbor’s dog got loose and chased me, it was Charlie’s front door I burst through, terrified, into safety. When we were still so young that girls were icky, it was each other Charlie and I told our parents we’d be marrying. When the adults were winding down for the night but the kids were still wound up, it was Charlie’s little brother Jack who would whine the phrase forever etched in my memory “pleaaaase, just one more minute!” And when I moved away the summer before I turned eight, it was Charlie who called our new landline to tell me that our coach-pitch baseball team finished the season “undefeatable,” as he put it then.
The new landline was in Montoursville, a tiny rural town in northern Pennsylvania. Before my family left Angola, we had a going away party on a golf course where Charlie and I played all night in the sand bunkers. When it came time to say goodbye there were hugs and tears and more hugs and so on, to the point that Charlie’s dad said “come on guys, they’re just moving, you’re acting like you’ll never see each other again.” And we thought, oh, right, it’s not goodbye forever — except it was, or has been so far, as I’ve never once been back to Angola, and I have no idea what Charlie looks like or how he’s doing.
All of a sudden there’s less of you.
I came of age in Montoursville, lived there from eight to eighteen, and still go back often to visit my parents. My first friend there was the neighbor-boy Brandon. He smashed my head against a brick wall at Boy Scouts; I smacked the shit out of him during a game of flag football in fourth grade; neither time did we skip a beat. We typed “naked boobs” into the Google search bar on the desktop in my dad’s office while my parents were across the street at a barbecue. He started stealing cars in middle school; we grew apart. I kept playing baseball — all summer every summer. My teammates were my closest friends. We had sleepovers at Curtis’s house, then smoked our first cigars around his fire pit, then stole our first beers from his dad (piss warm Coors Light), then threw our first parties when his parents were out of town. At one of them, my now-bestfriend Calen and I got the perfect straight guys’ excuse to release some homoeroticism: two girls told us they’d make out if we gave each other a peck on the lips. We did, and they did, all on Curtis’s bathroom floor. On that same floor, one of those same girls finished giving me my first blow job after we got too cold on the trampoline.
I brought some of Montoursville with me to Pittsburgh but didn’t keep in touch with Curtis — or most of the other friends I spent hour after joyful adolescent hour with. My high school sweetheart was a year behind me in school and came to Pitt when she graduated. That first year, without her, I made a few lifelong friends, though its a miracle I can call them that now. My relationship with her started to unravel, slowly at first, and then ever-more-slowly the harder we tried to salvage it. We tried and tried and tried, for four long years, until I was graduated and she nearly so, and eventually our entire lives were only that — an all-consuming effort to rekindle a fire that was out for good. I had long neglected the few friendships I’d been lucky enough to stumble into, and was living with the girl I neglected them for, and was feeling trapped deep in a pit of despair, and was fully prepared to accept that pit as my fate. I couldn’t bring myself to break it off with her, so if we couldn’t work things out, then we’d just be miserable together forever. And then the friends I’d neglected so severely — Alex and Sarah — became my saving grace. Alex knew how bad things were with my girlfriend, and he respected my desire to stick it out, but one day he sat me down and told me bluntly that it wouldn’t be long before I had no friends left at all. If I had it in me to make a change, though, I could crash on the living room floor at his and Sarah’s place. In fact, it was Sarah — who I’d grown so close to freshman year and then stopped talking to completely to keep the peace in my toxic relationship — who suggested to Alex that they offer up their home to me. Overwhelmed with gratitude (what had I done to deserve such grace?) and sensing that this was my last chance to escape a lifetime of misery, I packed my things and left my high school sweetheart for good. We haven’t spoken since.
All of a sudden there’s less of you.
I slept on Alex and Sarah’s floor for eight months, then got an apartment of my own across town, where I lived for another year — my sixth and final in Pittsburgh. Sarah and I reconciled, and they and their friends brought me back into the fold, and we all tried our best to make up for lost time. Right off the bat, in February of 2020, we planned a trip to Chicago to see a Dorian Electra concert. We’d heard some talk about something called SARS-CoV-2, a vaguely scary pathogen emerging in China; an early American case was detected in Chicago. We went anyway, stayed in Ukrainian Village, drank polish vodka from a sniper-shaped bottle, and got to storm the stage at the concert. SARS-CoV-2 became COVID-19, and the world went to shit, but the spring and summer of 2020 were some of the best months of my life. Trapped in an apartment with your two closest friends, in your early twenties, all gainfully employed but working from home, essential-business-beer-distributor down the street — dark days, indeed.
Things went on that way for a while. It was an era shot through with deep-belly cackles. I re-entered a friend group that helped me re-enter the world. God only knows where I’d be without them — an unpayable debt. But then, all of a sudden, Sarah was applying to grad schools, and I was applying to law schools. We both applied all over, in many of the same cities, in the hopes of ending up in the same place. Alex would follow Sarah wherever she went; a few of our other friends said they’d do the same. It turns out getting into a clinical psych PhD program is extraordinarily difficult, much more so than getting into law school. Sarah resolved to apply again next cycle. Villanova, my top choice, offered me a full ride. I accepted. Come fall, I was off to Philly, and everyone else was staying in Pittsburgh. Not long after I left, Alex and Sarah split up after four years together. Neither of them live at the apartment that was once my lifeline and the scene of countless blissful hangouts. Sarah moved to Maryland to start grad school this past fall. For the first time in seven years, all three of us live in different cities.
You know the line.
Villanova was my top choice because Philadelphia was my top city. I’ve stayed in touch with three friends from Montoursville, two of whom now live in Philly; moving here meant reuniting with them after six years apart. My family is scattered all across the eastern United States: parents in Montoursville, brother in Maryland, grandma in Delaware, grandparents in Virginia, aunt in Manhattan, cousins in Massachusetts, uncle in Florida. So Philadelphia is a sort of center of gravity. On balance, I’m closer to my loved ones than I was in Pittsburgh. I expect that one day my parents will move closer, maybe the Massachusetts cousins too.
I moved here with my heart set on staying forever, despite my final two years in Pittsburgh being, as I’ve said, among the best of my life. I left because I thought I could maintain close ties with the friends I cherished there, and start nurturing closer ties with my old high school friends and my family. I seriously underestimated how hard both those things would be, but I think I was only somewhat naïve rather than hopelessly so. Time will tell.
I also came to Philadelphia with the intention of thrusting myself into the life of its community. I thought I’d do so as a lawyer, but quickly ditched all that for freelance journalism and writing. My goal was to become in the know, and known. I was eager to insert myself into the intellectual and artistic and political life of the city. I think, for the past year, I’ve often made a fool of myself in pursuit of this goal — but then, of course I have, being a stranger to the city, and to writing and journalism, and, really, to everything I set my sights on. I’ve also learned a lot, and seen some success in writing, and even managed to get the city to clean up a pile of garbage here and there, which strikes me as unambiguously good.
All this to say: I came to Philadelphia to plant roots, in the broadest sense. To tighten up my loose ties to family and friends, to cultivate a civic and professional network in a new city, to take all the fragments of my life and start shaping them into something coherent, durable, and vital for the kids I hope to raise one day. To set in motion an unscattering.
Scenes from Indiana no longer appear in my dreams. It’s too far gone, the memories grown cold, dormant. But my subconscious is still teeming with people and places from Montoursville and Pittsburgh. My hope is Philadelphia will integrate with them, not displace them, though I have my doubts. Often over the past two years this Don Draper lament has resonated with me deeply:
To me it sounds like Don is describing, not just his own experience, but some collective experience all Americans are sharing in, right now, today. We long to recover a glorious past, or to escape from an awful past into a glorious future, and no matter how different those impulses are, they both start from a miserable present. We’re all scratching at life, trying to get in, convinced we can’t until some vague obstacle gives way or some improbable puzzle piece falls into place.
In my case, I’ve been watching my life unfold, waiting for the day Philadelphia really starts to feel like home, and I’ve made it, the plan worked, I’m thriving with my family and friends, I’m a well-known well-revered do-gooder in the city, a keystone of a flourishing community. Then I’ll finally be living.
But clean lines only work one way. You can clear cut a forest in a day; you can’t make it reappear the next. The fact is I’ve made a lot of clear cuts in my life, some parts of me are stuck in far away places or even just plain gone, and the unscattering is only just underway. If it’s going to happen at all, it’ll take time.
They’ve deforested Russia, exhausted her soil, and turned it into a steppe. I’m a man of hope, planting a tree, and I don’t care how many times I make a fool of myself on the road to reforestation. I think I’ll outlive the laughter.
Nick - incredible writing. Keep going!
A lovely piece, evocative. It echoes a sense of longing for places that have receded into the past of my own life. I also can’t help but be amazed (and a little bemused) that you are all of maybe 25 years old, if I estimate right? I bring this up being just in my mid-30s myself, so it may seem odd to point this out, but you’re still so young! So much of your relationship to this past and these people will continue to change and evolve in completely unpredictable ways. Surely, though, your present perspective and thoughtfulness will serve you well to process that growth and evolution.