Sad Girl Spring
A sweet, homesick spring in which I cry in all kinds of places and share the best ones with you here.
I’m 42 years old, and for the first time in my life, I’m living alone. My daughter is at school in California, my husband is at home in Atlanta where my bonus daughter is in her final days of high school, and I am here in Brooklyn with a room of my own– a tiny studio with big windows that face the sunrise, just down the street from the park. I’ve been here most of the time since February. At times, I am exultant in my independence, other times I’m homesick, like when you’re a little kid at sleep away camp and you know tomorrow will be fun but you miss your bed and the familiar sounds of your house. I miss my cat. The husband comes up every other weekend or so, which is a tight squeeze in this double-bed outfitted studio, but also feels chic and charmingly European?
I also have a lot of time to feel sad, which is the quieter, heavier side of my temper. Pencils are down on my daughter’s childhood. There’s no more runway, the plane is in the air. And, there’s a weird peace in knowing that it is impossible to avoid this feeling, no matter how “perfect” or how much time we’d had, I’d wish I’d done better, more, different. And, in a weird way, grieving her childhood is touching my own childhood and comforting little Whit in the moments where she felt scared, small, misunderstood.
I’m picking up things I haven’t had time for in the past 12-20 years, which has its own vulrnerabilities. Writing, for one. But also, exercise and painting and reading books. As I’m stepping back into these things, none of them are as easy as I remembered, and it’s hard for me to be light about it, because my relationship to time at 42 is very different than it was at, say, 25. I worry I may never be good at the things that I once thought I’d have been great at by now.
And then there’s the relentless way in which winter has really held on to this spring. It has been so cold. So gray. Nothing like a Southern spring at all. I feel a tug at what I know I’m missing in Atlanta. Sometimes, I’ll watch the bright leaves of our fig tree and listen to the birds chirping through our front door camera.
All of this comes with a light side of crying. Lots of little cries. The nice thing about New York is that you can cry anywhere–snuggled between two strangers on a subway, amidst the crowd on a sidewalk, tucked into a corner booth at Pastis– and it’s not that no one cares, more that no one minds. While you can cry anywhere, I’ve discovered a few places that are excellent for crying, especially in the spring.
Starting with The MET Cloisters. It’s quiet in a, been-here-forever kind of way. People are doing reverent, analog things like sketching and sitting with their eyes closed, face tilted to the sun. It’s the kind of place that will hold your heart gently, wisely, and with understanding. Highly recommend.
The Q Train is by far, hands down, the best train to cry on. No New Yorker has ever fought me on this. Especially during a misty, rainy spring. Pairs well with sad girl songs from the likes of Faye Webster and Clairo. I personally take the Q Train at all costs.
The Guggenheim is an excellent place to really get your sadness moving. A slow amble up that spiraled ramp is like a cold rinse for the soul. I’m a different person on the way down.
And, finally, don’t sleep on pocket parks. Sometimes I’ll walk through one just to see if I need to cry. It’s the emotional equivalent of going to the bathroom on a roadtrip at your mother’s insistence that you “just try.”
I know a lot of us feel afraid of crying. Despite jobs that encourage mental health days, and the celebrity status of so many psychologists and life coaches, the truth is, we live in a world that celebrates suppression. Crying unexpectedly in front of people feels embarrassing, ridiculous, silly. But crying alone is clarifying, empowering, important. And my favorite thing about crying is how wide-ranging the reasons for crying can be– awe, joy, sadness, grief, onions…
Many years ago, probably on Tumblr, I encountered Rose-Lynn Fisher’s Topography of Tears, a “visual investigation of tears… photographed through an optical standard light microscope” that moves me still.
Here’s wishing you a nice little cry this weekend. For any reason you like.
Beautiful. At least the warmth and sun has finally come in Brooklyn. 🙌🏼
The Cloisters are underrated. Glad you went; glad you wrote this. Thanks for bringing a little sad girl spring into our lives