There is a life I have already lived in, the way you can live in a piece of music before you’ve heard it all the way through.
It's night when I arrive there, glistening lights, in the sky, on buildings, twinkling on the ground against the vastness of a dark atmosphere. The weight of crowded voices and overlapping sounds settled on the shoulders of buildings and in the cracks of the sidewalk. The metal of the fire escape is warm, not hot, with a summer sun that set against a portrait of pinks and reds from just a few hours earlier. The light from the corner store bleeds out onto the brick, where glowing neon and warm whispers blend into a luminary hug.
I know this street, even if I don’t know its name yet. There's a particular way the air smells at this hour, the exhaust of a bus that has just gone and the memory of quickly demolished pizza still floating through the air. I know the songs shaking my speaker from inside, the sound of the wind through an open window, and the chorus of voices floating up from the street. I know that when I push open the door of the corner store, a bell will announce me, and the man behind the counter will look up and say my name.
And that’s when I know I’ve made it.
My grandfather had a dream first. I don’t know exactly what it was—it has passed through too many hands to be perfectly legible now. I asked him recently about that dream that floated around his head when he was my age. He can’t remember it, and for good reason. At my age, he was about to make a life for himself in the military, to be stationed in Okinawa, Japan, while his parents remained in Haiti—the miles between them measuring out everything they were not there to see. This life he sought was not written under the pretense of parental dreams. He didn’t pack those in his suitcase when he first left them to live in the United States. So the dream he sought was a piece of clay pulled from the earth, unrefined but the most authentic, and each day was one more attempt to shape that lump into something, anything.
And he did. That dream sat in the corner of his West Philadelphia house with my mother and grandmother, not directly passed onto their hands but still present. Maybe that’s why my mom craved a journey. For her, her 20–year–old soul lived across the county from Philadelphia, instead sitting on the floor of an apartment in San Francisco. There, the windows are open, letting in the bay breeze that lightly smells of salt and soft cigarette smoke. And the hardwood floors are slightly cold, a nice relief to the summer heat touching every inch of her skin. A vinyl record spins under a needle, letting songs by N.W.A. or Nina Simone (depending on her mood for the day) underscore the laughter of friends sitting at her side.
Eventually, she made it there. I know that moment existed truly, because I can smell the salty breeze when she laughs about something from her past. Notes floating through Nina Simone’s voice lived in my childhood home as much as I did, not just through music played on records still lightly faded from the San Francisco sun, but through how much those moments meant to my mother.
She took that clay and added texture to it. She gave it a smell, a touch, a taste, all little moments that boxed up a dream of hers in a small, intimate package. She’s proof that dreams can come true. She did not end up as a nurse like she once imagined for herself, but she let herself savor the soft resonances of a life that was always meant to happen.
Each day that I walk down Locust, I get closer to walking across the stage in a cap and gown. And I can hear the constant footsteps of professional expectations marching behind me. It’s a sound ringing in every undergraduate students’ ears like tinnitus. But even with those nagging questions—What will you do? Where will you live?—I am still walking down that same path. Maybe I’m not building that dream from clay, hoping to stumble across materials that do not yet exist. Maybe instead I’m traveling towards it?
That life is already there, already lit, already warm, already smelling of cooking spices and cold air. That future is around me, not something I look upon with my eyes to measure its distance, but something that I perceive laterally, like the way you turn your head toward a sound. That life exists! I just need to find the path to it, and the path is the part I am still working out.
At least what I know about this path is that it is without a job title. It is not a salary or a CV line or a position at a table of any particular importance. These things may exist in that life, they might be part of the texture, the way the red light from a scarf–covered lamp is a part of my room without being the point of the room. Along the way, I find the man at the counter saying my name. On that path, I pass by the coffee shop that sells the cold brew I like and my favorite table at a restaurant where the waiter already knows to bring water without ice. I’m walking down that path on a Saturday afternoon with nowhere to be and no guilt about that.
My mother gave me this. My grandfather gave it to her without knowing he was giving anything at all. That lump of clay he pulled from the earth has passed through enough hands now that it has taken the warmth of everyone who held it. It has my grandmother’s soft fingerprints usually reserved for book pages. It has the San Francisco bay breeze and Nina Simone and the cold hardwood floor. It has Okinawa, and Haiti, and every mile of ocean in between. It keeps returning to Philadelphia, but has gathered so many new scents, smells, and textures.
I don’t know the name of the street where I’ll bring that clay. But I know the quality of the light that comes through the window of its apartment. I know that the street lies at the end, or somewhere along the way, of that path. It is lit from within. I know I’ll get there, because I know it is still my feet beneath me. And I trust that around me are the dreams of everyone who raised me and everyone who I will soon know. I am walking toward that dream the way you walk toward music you can hear from the next room. It’s pulsating across the wall from where I write this. I’m not lost, I’m not directionless—I just have not quite yet arrived.
But I’m close.
And I’m getting closer every day.
