It feels a lot like 2016.
Okay wait–hear me out.
An election year for the States, 2016 saw a revivification of Black Lives Matter including nationwide protests, scary incidents of white nationalism worldwide, Casey Neistat was vlogging every day (seriously, if you hadn’t noticed, this is happening again), and I moved like seven or eight times in five different states and never really managed to live anywhere.
I turned 36 that year; I was (kind of) living in New Orleans on my birthday and didn’t really have anything to do, so I pinned a dollar to my shirt and went out alone as all (2) of my friends were working. That night, I hung out with some annoying Austrian guy who I ditched to crash a bachelor party, the groom of which I woke up next to very hungover the next morning.
Then I walked home from the Quarter to Midtown.
I do not remember that dudes’ name. I wrote him on my list as “not Anthony” because his friends’ name was Anthony.
The only other time I remember spending the night of my birthday alone was my 20th, when, after dropping my coworker off at home, I went back to the Halloween party we were just at where I technically knew no one, went home with some couple, and woke up in the morning intertwined with only one of them on the living room floor in a North Portland attic.
Just a few years later on my 24th birthday, I went to the oldest bar in my hometown where my best friends’ dad played a show. I was dressed as Dr. Frankenfurter, so maybe it was all that androgynous hyper-sexuality that I had draped myself in that made me sleep with my friends’ dads’ married bandmate.
While these three years also had the added element of infidelity, my birthdays have generally been peppered, sometimes liberally, with some kind of sexual indiscretion. The years excluded from this all-too-classic-Miranda trope were the years I took a trip, so beginning with my 30th, I’ve tried to take a birthday trip every year.
I went to San Francisco for my 30th birthday, revisiting the city where I lived from 24 to 27, and rather than getting fingered by a heroin addict via the access my mini-dress provided while ordering another Maker’s rocks and PBR (this really happened on my 26th birthday,) I celebrated with a quiet dinner at my best friends’ house and a couple drinks in Lower Haight.
On my 31st birthday, I went to Mexico City where I, believe it or not, was wined and dined early enough to be in bed by 10.
32 was the famous Three State Birthday when I had midnight drinks in Brooklyn, breakfast in Atlanta, and dinner in Austin. This was my all-time favorite birthday until last year when I ended up in Tokyo at the last minute being treated to private omikase sushi, the price of which I never want to know exactly and I certainly did not pay for.
I was talking to Bianca the other day. She’s a pro-nomad and just celebrated her 40th birthday; I messaged her something to the effect of “isn’t it weird to not be planning a birthday trip this year?”
And like, it’s so weird. I had such grand plans–that included Bianca, actually–I was going to rent a suite at a hotel in New York, and invite all my girlfriends that live there to come sip champagne and swim in the pool, and ring in my survival of four fucking decades on this fragile fucking globe at what is maybe the place most becoming a nomad like myself.
“I have slept in many places, for years on mattresses that entered my life via nothing but luck,” begins Diane Seuss‘ absolutely fucking bewitching poem in a recent edition of the New Yorker that made me think about all the places that I had slept by chance: random hostels booked on the fly, couches of people that have taken me in, even the pristine, white-sheeted hotel beds that I never want to rise from. It has been so fucking rare that I’ve actually put more thought into picking the place where I slept than the city that bed was in.
Before Covid, I had intended to rectify that; I wanted to go to New York for my birthday because this hotel is there, not the other way around.
The TWA hotel, named after the now defunct Trans-World Airlines, is housed in what used to be the TWA terminal–terminal 5, if I remember correctly–at JFK. It was designed by famed Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, and despite its futuristic design, it was closed in 2001 because it couldn’t accommodate the size of modern airplanes and security retrofitting in our then-new post 9/11 reality.
It then began the nearly 20 years of days when it sat virtually untouched and largely vacant.
I was devastated when the Saarinen terminal closed. I got to see it for myself in 2000 on my way back from Milan; I had a 5 hour layover at JFK before my flight to St. Louis, and I remember making my way there from immigration, stepping inside the front doors, and immediately picking my jaw off the floor.
The buildings’ macro design is impressive enough–made to imitate a bird in flight, it resembles the Sydney opera house in shape and color–but what photos of it fail to render was the tiny 1″ tile with which every interior wall is covered. I remember running my fingertips across them, wondering why I had never even heard of this place before.
Though I’d love to tell you that the Saarinen terminal was simply too beautiful to destroy, it was largely saved by its addition to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Most Endangered Places list in 2003, sparking preservation efforts from many different angles. It was finally added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, which not only prevented its demolition, but also protected its maintenance budget, forcing the Port Authority to shell out the moola to revive it.
This forced Jet Blue to build their brand new, multi-hundred-million dollar terminal around the existing Saarinen terminal in 2008, even so far as to connect the two, though the latter would remain completely closed to the public.
Until two years later.
In 2011, as a part of Open House New York, the Saarinen terminal was opened for exactly two nights for people to tour. I lived in Brooklyn at the time, and had been dying to see it again since I first laid eyes on it when I was 19.
But you see, I was too busy planning a birthday trip to DF for such an event to even be on my radar. I only found out that it had happened weeks after I returned home from Mexico with a mild sunburn and a wicked case of shigella.
And here’s what I mean by all of this:
I’ve been looking at flights lately. I’ve been wondering where, exactly, an American such as myself could go by the end of next month. Now, I’m not saying that I’m definitely staying or definitely going, but I know for sure that I currently live in a 7,000 year old city of 17 million people that sits in the middle of the world.
So as far as cities go that behoove someone who’s been traveling between them for her entire adulthood, the only one that sits on two continents is probably a better place than most.
Because if I do decide to leave, what do I risk missing during all those days of planning? And if I stay, maybe I risk a repeat of 2016: some cavernous CBD short term rental, a monumental hangover, and some dude next to me who’s name I can’t recall that’s getting married in two days time.
But hey, I still have 38 days left to decide.
[up next: plane tickets, or no?]
xoxo–M