These New York Times

The Friday morning I arrive in Brooklyn, it starts to rain. Seattle style—a cool, even, grey overcast and a threatening drizzle that never throws a full downpour punch. I arrive to no parade, no one at the airport and no clear idea why I’ve come here.

I’ll be writing. I’ll be working. I’ll be getting a little space, out of Dodge, a change of scenery. Recovering from my breakup and this long winter. Taking myself out of context and trying on the bi-coastal life I’ve been sketching in the margins of magazines. I’ll deepen my meditation practice. Yes, yes, that’s it. I’m here to meditate in the middle of the only chaos I could find louder than my own skull.

The truth is that I don’t know precisely why I’ve come to New York for the summer, or why I’m lugging a suitcase filled with blank journals and my nicest office casual. On this Friday morning, the sky and my baggage are heavy.

A few days after I arrive, I begin to understand where I am on a map. I’ve traded the carefully manicured moustaches of Capitol Hill for the emaciated high-waisted jeans of Williamsburg. This neighborhood is familiar to me; I feel quickly at home among its used bookstores and artisan baristas. The summer heat is breaking over the city and everyone is hounding their landlords to install their air conditioners. My skin sticks to strangers on the rush hour subway. 

I begin to know what I’m doing here.

I am sleeping in a windowless room on borrowed sheets, surviving on a change purse of savings and an unlimited Metrocard. I’m hustling part-time office work in strange corners of Manhattan. I am getting a library card, a used guitar and a real meditation cushion. And I am getting used to being alone. 

I am considering the last 12 months of my life and wondering why my impulses have felt so dull and my reflexes so slow. It’s clear I’ve been stuck but I can’t appraise what part has been sticking. The job? The man? The weather? Is it my thirties? My Jesus year? Am I washed up? Have I peaked? Do I need to go back to school? On a fast? To volunteer in Japan? Have I gotten too comfortable? Or—my god—complacent? 

For almost a year, I’ve sat at my writing desk and produced incomplete sentences about blurry ideas I’ve heard somewhere before. After receiving a blush of acknowledgments for my acting in the autumn, I have been debilitated in audition after audition all spring. I have been nourished by my artistic collaborators in Seattle; I have sat at their table all year long but I’ve brought little to share and somehow still leave starving and sort of sad.

One of the books I stashed in my suitcase is Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, about coming to New York and becoming an artist beside Robert Mapplethorpe—her account of the Chelsea Hotel, of mingling with Joplin and Corso and Shepard, of Kent State and Bobby Kennedy and writerly all-night doughnut shops in the West Village. 

“Reading” is a gentle way to describe the voracious turning I am doing over those pages. Often I am weeping. It is ridiculous, really. Sentimental, nostalgic, embarrassing. My tears swell on the L train as I spend my commute mourning the premature demise of Jimi Hendrix and the unthinkable assassinations of the late 1960s. I devour the divine poems—“Howl,” “Visions of Johanna,” Patti’s “Elegy for Edie Sedgwick”—of that time. That place. 

I cry when I read this book, like I am replaying my own memories. I know. Sentimental. Embarrassing. Romantic. But I carry it in my bag and refer to it like a guidebook, a topography of an artist’s path. A compass suggesting a way to the next there from here.

Before I moved to Seattle for grad school in 2001, I lived in New York for a year. I left because I knew New York didn’t need me. It was filled with imaginative, subversive artists, many of whom had better ideas and better resources than I did. Making work here when I was 23 felt like throwing paper clips against the wall of an empty room. 

In my youth, in all of my uncertain arrogance, I was so desperate to be relevant. My need to be noticed was ravenous. In order to create, I coveted a community with patience for the potential I knew I was harboring.

In Seattle, I found that.

But now I need something new again. My work has been repeating itself. I have been clinging to my past successes rather than risk a bold stride toward my curiosity, and potential failure. 

So I return to this place. New York still doesn’t need me but there is something here that I need. I am living simply this summer. A worker among workers. I am using my anonymity as an experimental workspace. I am shouting into the void, not to hear a response, but simply to listen for the sound of my own voice.

Marya Sea Kaminski is a Seattle-based writer and performer. In 2010, she won the Genius Award for theatre from The Stranger and the Gregory Award for Outstanding Actress from Theatre Puget Sound. Kaminski will perform excerpts from her latest solo show, Bonnie and The Robberie, on Sept. 3 and 4 at Bumbershoot.

Illustration by Bob Suh