My Inner Sky by Mari Andrew

Author:Mari Andrew [Andrew, Mari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a line in the 1994 movie version of Little Women that resonated with me so much when I first saw it in fifth grade that I paused, rewound, and played the scene until I could copy the full dialogue into my journal. “I love our home but I’m just so fitful I can’t stand being here. I want to change, but I can’t, and I just know I’ll never fit in anywhere.”

Jo thinks she’ll never fit in anywhere because she doesn’t feel like she belongs in Concord, Massachusetts, in general. But she finds home in so many other places: among writers, with her sisters, and at her writing desk, the things to which she devotes her attention.

During the spring, I incorporated the migrating-bird rest stop into my morning routine. I’d walk down to the grocery store, get a small coffee, and sit on the bench and just watch the plants dance a little in the breeze, like they were middle schoolers too afraid to really let loose on the dance floor. I was almost always the only one there as sunlight began to spread across the plaza, and of course I romanticized it as a sacred moment in which I was directly and solely communicating with nature.

Over time, it became pretty clear that the birds were not mistaking this little sculpture for a meadow. It was never an entire flock who descended upon the plants smooshed into wires, but a few at a time who cautiously pecked around it, then flew away over the nearby gym and rows of tenements, which had served as insufficient shelter for many people who surely never felt completely at home here either.

But these birds are migrants; by the design of their species, they will never feel fully at home anywhere. I think about how they might view these rest stops—to me, they seem so artificial and insufficient, but maybe the reasons a lot of us feel at home would seem artificial and insufficient to anyone else.

The reason I feel at home in New York is not because I can easily find my way through all five boroughs and I love every second of being on any subway and I have fallen in love with each building. Obviously, it’s a set of specificities that ground me, and make me feel like I belong.

Ask someone what they love about their best friend, and you might get an answer so vague it sounds like they’re making things up. “Uh . . . she’s . . . a good listener? And fun? And . . . she has curly hair?” The more you love someone, the harder they are to describe in general. When I talk about what I love about New York to someone who’s never been, I sound about as informed as someone who’s never been either. “I love the energy. The buildings? The people. You know, things going on all the time. I guess.” I begin to think, “Do I actually like it at

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