My eyes light up whenever I ask someone where they’re from and they say these magical four words, “I’m from New Jersey.”
My heart piques, it wants to spill, but my mouth shoots ahead, “I love New Jersey!” They’re taken aback asking, “Why?”
“The turnpikes are amazing!”
Usually, their faces contort with confusion alongside a short silence, but I can’t keep myself from smiling, remembering how I learned what life could be. It’s hard to explain a lifetime to a person that you just made eye contact with 5 seconds ago.
They will never know of my solo hike on Mount Tammany running on 3 hours of sleep, wandering 1 mile off trail in the afternoon with no water, food, or map but only faded colored markings on rocks to guide me back to the end of the loop. I was surely going to die there if I didn’t catch my fall, nearly hitting the back of my head on the damp honed rocks, slipping and anxiously rushing to beat the sunset. I remember coming back as if nothing happened telling you the story. You comically responded, saying that you wouldn’t have known if I died and where, that you’d initially just be pissed that I was late and worry later.
It would be irrelevant to tell them of my most interesting conversations I had with a random McDonalds employee about their content creation, hobbies, and future as their manager yelled at them to shut the fuck up and continue cleaning. Or, my sobering talk with this one dude I met at the house party you hosted, talking about our mutual gaming clips and addiction.
It’d be inappropriate to describe to them how loved I felt—with a case of a burger-borne norovirus the day before, somehow dragging myself through a day trip to NYC meeting people from Twitter—being tucked into bed by you after you picked me up when I was seeking refuge in your antique LOONA puffer jacket against the unfamiliar east coast cold.
Although, I think it’d be funny to tell them about the time I went to this hillbilly diner on the side of the highway, presumably segregated from their rowdy white patrons, and was seated on the barren side of the restaurant. I’m pretty sure I was racially profiled. At the same time, it’d be neat to tell them about how the kindest public bus driver named John drove me 40 minutes to my hotel after his last stop, because I was dumb as fuck and took the wrong bus.
I could go on about how we had the house all to ourselves for two whole weeks—sleeping on the floor, burning my internship money by eating slop-takeout everyday, and us going shopping to stock the house, you making fun of me and later telling your friends how I’d rip the cardboard boxes into tinier and tinier pieces just to maximize space in the trash bin that later turned out to be the Leaning Tower of New Jersey, running through the unprompted storm to grab the car after our ceramic painting workshop, and nearly crashing your car which would’ve been entirely my fault—but it’d be too verbose.
Whenever the conversation about New Jersey flickers out, the nostalgic feelings of agency, curiosity, adventure, love, intimacy, authenticity, connection, vulnerability, carelessness, equanimity, and comfort wither in parallel. Glancing across the room, thinking of what else to say, the awkward pause reels me back into the reality that I’m standing in a packed ~200sqft living room at a San Francisco new-grad party, everyone I talked to is from Waterloo, and I’m still stuck in the soul-sucking-suburbs of California.
Funnily enough, I used to think that those same feelings of life that I miss and yearn for only exist in New Jersey. After intentionally looking and walking around both neighborhoods, I came to a conclusion that New Jersey is just a regular suburb on the east coast with more trees than silicon—and turnpikes.
a chungus in new jersey (@yumyumyamq)