Few experiences have ever moved me as deeply, and with such consistency, as crossing back into Manhattan after a long stretch away. Even if I’m exhausted following a red-eye flight, or depressed to find dirty gray snowdrifts piled alongside the highway, something changes the moment I spot the skyline rising at the far end of the bridge. It’s like a booster shoot of adrenaline, a surge that reminds me how lucky I am to live here and how I’ve managed to become a tiny but integral part of this iconic place.
But rather than the rush I’d expected, on this trip home, all I could feel was a lead balloon rolling around on the floor of my stomach. As Holly, Jen, and I shot between the silver trusses of the 59th Street Bridge in a cab with a broken air conditioner, it hit me: You don’t live here anymore.
For the record, I hadn’t wanted to come back here after Brazil. I knew that Jen and Holly wanted to spend some time with their boyfriends before we left on the next leg of the trip and that we had to pass through New York to make our connecting flight to Kenya. But though I could understand the logic, I couldn’t come to terms with our return to town. Hadn’t we just said good-bye to all of our friends? Made a clean break from the city?
I planned to spend the next two weeks hiding out at my friend Sarah’s place. She and her husband, Pete, had just bought a brownstone in a yet-to-be-gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn and had insisted that I spend my layover with them. No need to convince me, since, unlike the girls, I didn’t have a boyfriend to shack with. It was Brooklyn or bust.
Our cab pulled to a jerky stop outside Sarah’s office on Madison and 68th Street, and I slid out to retrieve my backpack from the trunk.
“So I’ll see you guys next week, right?” I said, handing my friends some cab fare. After spending nine weeks glued to one another’s sides, it felt bizarre to go in separate directions.
“Yeah, we’ll catch up at the Indian consulate,” said Jen. “Let’s not wait until we get to Nairobi to get our visas.”
I’d barely waved good-bye before the cab pulled away leaving me loitering in front of Oscar de la Renta. It felt weird. While my Teva sandal tan, bandana headband, and grungy, overstuffed pack put me right at home in the company of backpackers, I felt sloppy and glaringly out of place here in the swankiest part of the Upper East Side. And come to think of it, in the Manhattan fishbowl in general. Trying to avoid eye contact with a matron walking two Yorkshire terriers, I hauled my stuff to the nearest pay phone and called Sarah.
“Schmanders! You’re here!” she shrieked. “Where are you? Don’t move. I’m coming right down.”
Within forty-five seconds, she’d flown down from her office and located me on the corner. “It’s so good to see you!” she said, giving me a huge hug. “I figured you’d have this big ol’ mama jamma bag, so I asked Pete if he could pick us up and drive us home.”
“Perfect,” I said, relieved to avoid the subway. “Wait…Pete’s driving?”
“Oh, I didn’t tell you? We bought a car!” Sarah beamed.
“Congrats, Sar! Sounds like you guys are really moving up in the world.”
“Yeah, right. We’re really living large.” She made a face as she whirled her mermaid-length hair up into a messy twist. As usual, she had pulled together some funky-chic outfit that would seem over the top on me but looked amazing on her five-foot nine-inch supermodel frame.
“Yo! Ladies! Need a lift?” Pete pulled up to the curb across from us in a red Honda Civic hatchback.
“Hey, babe.” Sarah opened the passenger side door and gave Pete a kiss. “Look who showed up at my office. Can we keep her? Can we?”
“Hmm, I’ll have to think about that,” he said, tossing my pack into the trunk. “So, what’s up, Miss World Traveler? Hope you’re hungry, because I’ve been smoking ribs for half the afternoon.”
As I’d recently discovered, in addition to his job as a psychotherapist and devoted husband, Pete was also an award-winning barbecue champ. On summer weekends, he and Sarah hauled several grills and smokers up and down the East Coast, competing for prizes with their team, Notorious BBQ. I won’t lie: part of the appeal of staying with my married friends was the prospect of their nightly gourmet dinners.
Pete wasn’t kidding. As soon as he nudged open their front door twenty minutes later, the sweet, charred scent of caramelized meat hit my nose and sent my taste buds into mouth-watering overdrive. It was all I could do not to rip off the tinfoil covering the plates, grab a piece of pork, and tear into it like a wild animal.
“Why don’t you get settled in, cleaned up, or whatever, and we’ll put everything out for dinner,” Sarah proposed. “It’ll just be a few minutes.”
Stashing my bags near the futon (already made up with sheets and pillows), I couldn’t help but feel a bit like Pete and Sarah’s grungy kid who’d just showed up from two months of summer camp. I even had a big bag full of stinky laundry.
Even though she was two years younger than I, Sarah had always been the more mature one in our relationship. Giving myself a little tour of her very grown-up, very couple-y new place, it struck me just how differently our lives had evolved since college.
While I’d spent my early years in the city jump-starting my career, falling for (and subsequently disentangling myself from) my first very serious boyfriend, whirling through a new roster of guys, and eventually abandoning city life to go traveling, Sarah had lived more deliberately. After college, she’d moved to Manhattan, become an interior designer at an Upper East Side firm, met the love of her life, had a gorgeous destination wedding in Puerto Rico, bought a brownstone in Brooklyn, and landscaped the backyard that I was now wandering through. Sarah’s life seemed as immaculately, stylishly in order as a display window at Barney’s, while mine still looked as scattered and disordered as a sale rack at T.J. Maxx.
It wasn’t that I felt envious of her choices or wished I’d done things differently. If I’d gotten married in my midtwenties like Sarah, I certainly wouldn’t be traveling the globe with two friends, on my way to Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. But sometimes, like right now, I wondered what it might be like to walk in my friend’s Marc Jacobs flats, just for a day…
Someone had tried to pull the front door shut as quietly as possible, but the click of metal snapped me awake. Sliding off the futon, I stumbled into the kitchen and found that Sarah had left a pot of coffee warming for me and a note next to it: “AP—Home by eight or so. Help yourself to anything in fridge. BTW, we keep cigs in the freezer for guests, so feel free. Have a fun first day back in town!—Sar.”
Funny. I hadn’t smoked much since we’d been roommates during her first year in New York, but it was just like Sarah to remember my tastes (and bad habits).
So what now? Except for the spinning of the ceiling fan above the table, the room was completely quiet. I realized I’d be alone all day. It was the first time that had happened in months. I took a seat in one of the four empty chairs and plotted what to do with myself.
When we’d booked these tickets home, I’d decided against sending an e-mail to friends to let them know I’d be back. It felt disingenuous to tell everyone I’d be gone for an entire year just to roll back into town two months later. It would be better if I stayed out of sight and used these borrowed days to catch up on all the writing I hadn’t done in South America.
While I’d been away, I’d filled almost an entire notebook with half-fleshed-out ideas for pitches but had been growing too self-conscious to spend the hours necessary to transform them into full-fledged articles. I knew Holly didn’t care when I slipped off with the laptop stashed inside my day pack—she’d brought her own to write her For Me column—but I couldn’t pretend that Jen was indifferent.
Jen and I had diffused some of the tension between us in Rio, but it was clear that we still had a serious difference of opinion over working on the road. For me, crafting stories was a creative outlet, another tool for interpreting the world around me, but Jen had emerged as a travel purist. She believed the best way to experience a country was to live, eat, breathe, and sleep entirely in the moment—no electronics necessary.
Getting up to pour myself a bowl of Kashi Good Friends cereal, I wondered if Jen and I would ever see eye to eye on this issue. Things between us had come to a head during our last week in Brazil, as the final editing deadline for our Web site article approached. It had taken us days longer to complete it than we’d expected, forcing us to spend afternoons hunkered over the laptop rather than exploring the islands off the coast of Bahia. After that, even I had to admit that taking on such a labor-intensive project while traveling might have been a mistake.
I knew Jen’s suggestion to give up writing and assignments for a while made sense. Maybe I’d even have tried things her way if we had been on a two-week vacation. But we’d committed to this journey for an entire year, and I wasn’t prepared to sever ties with the professional contacts I’d worked so hard to establish. Did I really need to disappear off the radar just so I could free up another hour or two each day for self-exploration? I couldn’t understand setting aside my travel writing aspirations just when I begun having travels to write about.
Fired up and ready to get to work, I placed my cereal bowl and coffee mug next to Sarah’s and Pete’s in the sink and went over to my day pack to retrieve the laptop buried inside. I had a long, uninterrupted stretch of time in front of me, and I was determined to use it.
I’m not sure how things went so wrong, so quickly.
My first few days in Brooklyn were exactly what I needed. I reveled in the newfound autonomy. I got a ton of work accomplished—pitches written, e-mails answered, blogs posted—but the novelty of so much solitude wore thin pretty quickly.
On day three, I had trouble getting motivated. By day five, I’d grown distracted and restless. I constantly leapt up to pour more coffee. Or to make a snack. Or to wash the dishes (lest Pete and Sarah find me a bad houseguest). Instead of writing, I checked my e-mail obsessively. While I’d been hoping to get responses from editors, my only messages were “friend requests” for some Web site I’d never heard of, called Facebook.
When I’d started getting these messages several weeks earlier, I’d figured they were just spam and deleted them. Now, starving for distraction, I grabbed another cup of coffee, created a profile, and accepted the fifty or so requests I had waiting.
Within minutes, any plans I’d had to work that Friday were totally abandoned. I was dragged into a black hole of procrastination, devouring every scrap of information that my old friends from high school and college had posted on their home pages. I hadn’t spoken with some of them since the day we’d graduated, but now I was eagerly learning every lurid detail of their adult lives.
The first pictures I saw were of my friend Celeste getting married on the steps of the Don Cesar Beach Resort, not far from where we’d grown up. Then the cute guy I’d sat next to in high school English holding his wife and their baby. My best friend from gymnastics as a kid—who now had a few kids herself.
Scrolling through the profiles, I was hit right and left with news of engagements and weddings and babies. I should have been happy for them, thrilled even. But sitting there in Pete and Sarah’s empty living room, with the fan creaking and clicking overhead, I felt a kind of heaviness settling upon my chest.
Somehow, while I’d been distracted by other things—like getting on my feet in the city or inching up the magazine masthead—girls I’d once had slumber parties with had proceeded to grow up and settle down. I knew twenty-eight wasn’t a shockingly young age to start a family, but because I live in Manhattan’s bubble of eternal youth, it was easy to trick myself into thinking that I had years before marriage and kids would enter the picture. After all, if thirtysomething career women in New York were still going out, sipping Cosmos, and dating a new guy every week, I still had plenty of time to get serious—right?
I clicked through several more profiles created by friends and colleagues in the city (who, thank God, were still single). By the time I’d worked through the list, there was still one person from my past whom I had to find, someone I’d been thinking about ever since we’d left for Lima back in June.
I wanted to know what had happened to Jason.
I’d started dating him about five months before the girls and I were scheduled to start our RTW trip. We’d both agreed in the beginning that it couldn’t possibly turn into anything serious, but we both fell a little harder than either of us had expected to. He was the first guy I’d felt such a strong connection with since Baker.
In tears during our breakup, Jason promised to keep in touch and said that if we were both still available after I returned, we could try to pick up right where we’d left off. He’d sent me an e-mail shortly after we arrived at Loki hostel, which I took as a good sign. Maybe we could keep the door open for a relationship down the road.
We’d traded a few newsy e-mails since then, but something had definitely gone wrong after I’d sent a note saying that I’d be coming back through New York in August. That’s when he’d just…evaporated. I couldn’t figure out if he’d gotten busy or just missed my e-mail. So I’d sent him a second, ever-so-casual note on the day I’d arrived back in Brooklyn, asking him if he’d like to hang out.
Digital silence.
At first I’d been disappointed. Then pissed. I mean, we’d been in a relationship, and he’d been the first to reach out after I left—why was he stonewalling me now?
After checking his old MySpace page, it took me all of 1.3 seconds to figure out why I hadn’t gotten a reply. There, right next to a new photo of Jason dressed in some ridiculous sailor’s outfit and faux mustache (which I seriously hoped was a costume), were the words: “Status: In a Relationship.” A little more scrolling revealed several gushy messages from some new GF, a mousy brunette who looked as if she’d yet to graduate college. And they’d posted a handful of disgustingly cute photos together. In one he was posed behind her as she held a puppy in her arms. A goddamn puppy?!
I should have been prepared for the consequences of my online snooping, but I hadn’t steeled myself for that broomstick-in-the-solar-plexus sensation. Forcing myself to stop rubber-necking the remains of my relationship, I mashed down the power button. The evidence that Jason had moved on tunneled out into an empty gray screen.
I felt like slapping myself. What was my problem? Jason had every right to date some new (significantly less cool) chick now that I’d checked out of his life. But the fact that he’d forgotten me so quickly stung like a second-degree burn.
I stalked into the kitchen and yanked open the freezer, pushing my way through the tinfoil tundra to find the one thing that could offer immediate relief. I located the box of cigarettes behind a shrink-wrapped slab of meat and yanked one out even before I’d walked outside. Wait. Matches. Phone. I found both and went into the backyard to light up.
“No way! He’s already got a new girlfriend?” shrieked Holly as I sucked on the end of the American Spirit. “Wow, that man must really have been crazy about you.”
“How in the world do you figure that?’
“Well, he clearly had to fill the void you left as quickly as possible.”
Holly always had a truly impressive way of spinning the truth to make me feel better.
“Look, Amanda, he adored you—there’s no question about that. But he knew you were leaving for an entire year. Most guys wouldn’t have hung in there for as long as he did. Not unless they really cared.”
“Even if that’s the case, it didn’t take him very long to get over it.”
“Trust me, he’s not over you. If he were, he’d have no problem grabbing a beer for old times’ sake, now, would he?”
Thank God for Holly. She spent a half hour talking me off the ledge, refusing to let me descend into total depression. But it was only after she considered me stabilized and in no danger of causing harm to myself (other than chain-smoking, of course) that she released a bombshell of her own.
“So you remember my editor at For Me, Meghann, right? Well, she just called me about an hour ago, really upset.”
“Oh wow, is everyone having a bad day? What happened?” I selected another thawed-out cigarette. I already felt nauseated, but lighting another one seemed like the right thing to do.
“Apparently, the magazine folded today. It’s finished. They’re not going to run any more issues after this one.”
I stopped in my tracks and let the lighter fizzle out. “Wait…what? They’re folding the magazine? What’s going to happen to your column?”
“The column is done, too. I won’t be getting more checks after my next one.”
“God, Holly. Are you okay?” I raced back inside. “Do you want me to come over? I can leave right now. What’s your subway stop again?”
“No, no, it’s fine. Don’t come over,” she said firmly. “I’m already here with Elan, and we’ve been figuring things out since Meg called. It’ll be fine.”
“Holly. Are you sure? I can be there in ten minutes. It’s no problem.”
“Yeah. I’ll be okay. I just don’t know what to do about money, because that column was really my only source of income for the trip. I’ve only got about six thousand in the bank, and we haven’t even bought our round-the-world tickets yet.”
Holly was referring to the string of tickets that we’d secured through a San Francisco–based travel agency called AirTreks—international flights starting in Kenya, then connecting through India, Dubai, Southeast Asia, Bali, New Zealand, and Australia. The $2,200 price tag was a bargain—unless we couldn’t actually come up with the money to pay it.
I could barely ask the next question. “Can you still come on the rest of the trip?”
“I don’t know. Of course I want to come with you guys. But is it really smart to fly all the way to Africa without knowing if I can afford to fly back again?”
The answer was probably no, but I couldn’t even imagine continuing at this point without Holly. The three of us were a team now, a force. There was just no way two of us could face the world without our third.
“Well no, but, Holly,” I said, scrambling to think of a creative solution. “Whatever you do, don’t decide to stay just yet. There has to be something else we can do to make money on the road. Could we work at one of the hostels? Pick fruit somewhere?” I joked that we could all sell our eggs to a fertility clinic for cash—I’d actually spoken with one traveler who’d done as much and pulled in about eight grand in the process.
My brain was racing on all cylinders, trying to calculate how much money I had left in the bank. I’d made some decent money while freelancing, and I had some savings I was using to fund my own travels. Could I afford to lend Holly the money for her round-the-world ticket? Would she accept?
“Holly, just promise me one thing. No matter what you ultimately decide to do, just say you’ll still meet us next Monday to get the visa for India. You can always decide later not to come with us, but you should at least apply, just in case.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line.
“I’ll come meet you guys,” she said. “But I can’t promise anything.”
I didn’t need her to. If she showed up, that would be enough. As soon as Holly and I said good-bye, I clicked the receiver to get a dial tone, then immediately called Jen.
A few days later, I found myself back across the East River, laptop bag slung across my body and pillow lines crosshatched across my face. I’d opted to reenter the city a couple of hours early, hoping the quick pace and frenetic energy would kick-start me back into writing mode. Jen, Holly, and I weren’t meeting at the consulate until 11 a.m., so the idea was to grab a cup of coffee and get cracking.
Standing with the restless mob at the coffee pickup counter, I felt my anxiety level rise. Man, I’d forgotten how hostile a Midtown Starbucks could be when people desperately needed a $5 attitude adjustment. The smell of stress percolating in the room was enough to make me appreciate the moments of relative calm and stillness the girls and I had experienced while sipping freeze-dried Nescafé in Latin American hostels.
In the back seating section, the air vibrated at an even higher anxiety level. People jammed elbows to get their laptops plugged in at the single four-man workstation, and others were hovering intently over two-tops, trying to command the space even before the current occupants had finished their coffee. The situation triggered my fight-or-flight response, and I just didn’t have the energy right now to duke it out for a sticky table next to the bathroom.
Jostling past the business suits, wayward tourists, and posh media girls, I pushed my way outside into the milky September sunshine and felt a brush of chill against my skin. Fall was a whisper away. I prayed Holly wouldn’t have to stick around New York to usher it in.
I managed to find an empty seat in a public atrium nearby, popped open the laptop, and willed myself to do something useful. Unless you could count draping myself across the futon, eating processed snacks from the corner bodega, and forcing Pete to give me free therapy sessions, I’d done absolutely nothing of value in the past few days.
Despite the high-octane Starbucks latte and my best intentions, I didn’t fare much better in Manhattan. I procrastinated, sifting through the photos we’d taken during the first part of the trip, before giving up on working altogether. I decided to stroll a dozen blocks uptown to the consulate and wait for the girls.
I was surprised to find Jen already there, slumped against the porous stone face of the building as if she might keel over without its support. Her normally vibrant, amber blond hair hung limply around her face in strings, and behind her sunglasses, her expression looked flat, utterly deflated. As I stood next to her against the wall, I suspected that this had much bigger implications than Holly’s pending status on the trip.
“Jenny.” I searched her face, trying to figure out what was happening on the other side of her dark lenses. “What’s going on? Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She sounded hollow. I could now see the streaks where tears had been hastily brushed aside.
“You sure?”
“Well, not exactly.” She adjusted herself, pressing her shoulder into the wall and letting her bag drop to the sidewalk. “I just…I know that when we leave for Africa, things with Brian and me are over.”
“Oh, Jen. I’m so sorry.” I moved in to give her a hug.
“It’s okay. I knew this was coming, but now that it’s here…well, I’m just so sad.”
“Well, you know you don’t have to go,” I said, trying to sound strong, convincing. “If you’re having doubts, you could stay here, try to salvage things…”
In a flash, I envisioned Jen dashing across the city to reunite with Brian while I tried to navigate through Africa and India without either of my friends.
“No, that’s the problem. I really don’t have any doubts. I want to keep going—but that will mean it’s totally over.”
I was just trying to figure out what to say, whether or not to suggest that there might be hope for the two of them, when Holly came bounding down the block.
“Ladies, I made it on time! I made sure to leave twenty minutes early so I could…” Holly was instantly alarmed once she got up close. “Oh no, Jen. What’s wrong?”
“I promise that I’ll explain everything later, but right now I just don’t feel like getting into it,” she said softly as she slid the strap of her bag back onto her shoulder. “Can we just go inside?”
“Of course, yeah,” said Holly, sounding stronger than the last time we’d talked. “We don’t have to discuss anything right now. Let’s just go in.”
Despite our varying states of crisis, I felt a tremendous sense of relief to be with both girls again. We pushed open the heavy black door and went inside. The scene at the consulate made the Midtown Starbucks look as chill as a Buddhist monastery. People in every manner of dress were absolutely everywhere, crammed onto lines that appeared to go nowhere, sitting on the floor to fill out forms, shouting across the room with no concept of indoor voices. But even the chaos couldn’t distract from the tightly wound American woman at the front of the line who was shrieking about some papers she’d faxed in but that had apparently been lost.
“Who is your supervisor? This is absolutely ridiculous! I took the time to get those forms signed and notarized and faxed in. Where are they?”
We couldn’t hear what the guy on the other side of the glass was saying, but he didn’t look ruffled. He motioned for her to move aside, and a smallish Indian man approached, shoving his papers through the slot in the window. The woman started shouting again, whirling on the guy who’d dared cut her off before she was done.
The three of us gawked at the scene for a minute, then glanced at each other.
“Holy shit, you guys,” said Jen, sounding both shell-shocked and thrilled. “Are we really doing this? Are we really going to India?”
The moment she posed the question, I could sense a shift in the mood between us. Jen wasn’t just asking whether or not we were headed to India. She was asking if we were ready to commit ourselves to this journey all over again.
When we had first agreed to go around the world, the three of us had had no real concept of what it would be like to spend every single day, hour, and minute on the road with two other people. We’d never tried compromising on every single decision. We hadn’t yet experienced the gravity of our choice to leave behind the people we loved.
Now, with South America behind us and the consequences of our actions as real and in your face as the shrieking woman before us, we were confronted with yet another decision: Could we commit to several more months of travel? Were we ready to leave New York City yet again in order to find something unknown and intangible on the road?
In that moment, the goals I’d been focused on all week seemed utterly trivial. The only thing I wanted now was to ensure that my best friends would continue on this adventure with me; that we’d see the world together, with no woman left behind.
I turned to Holly and shared what I’d been thinking from the moment I’d heard her column was going under.
“Look, I know you’re probably going to think this is a crazy idea, but please just consider it. If you’re willing to take it, I’d like”—I swallowed hard—“I’d like to lend you the money to buy your round-the-world ticket.”
Holly’s jade green eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open.
“Just think about it,” I said. “You don’t have to decide now. It’s not going to be enough to cover your daily expenses, and you probably don’t want to mix the whole friends and finances thing. But even if you take a year or two to pay me back, it’s okay…”
“Amanda,” she said softly. “You’d really do that for me?”
“Yeah, I would. I just know there’s still so much you want to do. Like getting your yoga certification at an ashram. Learning to scuba dive. Bungee jumping in New Zealand.”
“I never said I wanted to do that!”
“Oh, wait. You’re right. That was Jen. But still, consider it. This trip won’t be the same with just two of us. In fact, it probably wouldn’t work at all without you. Jen and I have talked about this—we might actually kill each other if you weren’t around.”
“Yeah, it’s true. You’re the buffer,” said Jen, smiling but still serious. “Three’s always supposed to be a crowd, but in this case, it’s really the perfect number. We all contribute something to the mix, balance out each other’s good and bad traits. Like, Amanda’s the motivator, I’m the planner—”
“And Holly, you’re the peacemaker,” I said. “What’s more important than that?”
We all descended into a rare silence as we snaked our way up through the long, painstakingly slow line. Nearly an hour passed before we handed our paperwork over to the Indian guy behind the glass.
“How long you visit India?” he asked.
“About a month. A little less,” Jen answered. He flipped through our passports and placed our forms inside of them.
“You come back four-thirty. Other line pick up.”
The three of us walked outside and started heading in the direction of Central Park. Once inside the stone walls, we sat down on one of the unoccupied green benches. I pulled out the nearly empty box of cigarettes and started to light one.
“You’re smoking?” Holly asked, staring at me. “I’ve never seen you smoke.”
“I started again this week,” I said, offering her the pack. “But I think I’m done.”
“No, thanks. I’m quitting, too,” she said. “They definitely don’t let you smoke at the ashram, so I should probably get a head start by giving them up now.”
I digested that comment for a couple seconds before turning to face Holly.
“What are you saying?” I asked, afraid to get my hopes up. “You’re coming?”
“Well, did you really mean what you said in there? About lending me the money. Is that really an option?” Holly shifted her gaze from her shoes to my face.
“Of course I meant it. I really want to do this. I mean, you’ve already paid for the volunteer program in Kenya, and India’s just a hop skip away from there. Besides, I can’t think of a better investment than you, Corbett. So do me proud and say you’ll accept.”
I felt as if I were proposing, and in a way, I guess I was. If she said yes, we’d all be tied to one another, for better or worse, through the next nine months and eight countries. “Okay, sugar mama,” she said. “Let’s do it. I accept.”
