Inner City, Inner Self: A Memoir (Alexis Brinkman)

The manner by which you enter a city is entirely dependent on where you start your journey. Moving from the sanctity of your 100 square foot closet apartment to the bustling streets is in essence a migration but cannot be compared to the pilgrimage you must take from one of New York's surrounding suburbs. So you start your Great Migration which sets the tone of your memory because it is both the first and last leg of your exploration. No matter what time the train taking you to the city leaves you become part of the monotonous daily commute. The hours of six, seven, eight, ten and twelve are a repetitive melange. Your shoes may not be as nice and your suit is inevitably lacking the third piece which contains nearly eighty percent of the prestige the entire ensemble projects but you progress regardless of garb because once the transformation starts your persona becomes less about what you look like and almost entirely about where you are going.

You're not at the station yet but you are standing as if the patience you had when you decided to drink coffee and eat before you left your house has evaporated over the course of the migration. You are inexplicably more anxious, more busy than you were before. The train rolls slower now and it hits the dock with a sober thud accompanied by a few drawn out squeals that let your know the flood gates are open. A swift current carries you deeper into the depths of the metro caverns. Rather than looking up a the signs for instruction of direction you plunge through blind to sights other that diverging streams of people and deaf to anything other than the all encompassing melody that will carry you from one corridor to the next. A man plays plastic bongos with wooden panels. He forces you to pick up pace that delivers you to a romantic acoustic serenade which prompts you to push forward until you reach the pan flute trio and what were once three separate covers of three separate songs becomes a whole piece with a fervent rhythm that echos and bellows connecting the tunnels, outlining your path.

If you happen to speak the language, the subway will take you from Rome to Hong Kong, through Paris, around Amsterdam, and to Mexico City. However coming here occasionally but not often you speak a pigeon form and thus can carry yourself from location A to location B. You are traveling along the veins of the thriving, growing, steam blowing organism that constantly nurses the greater structure sitting atop and can never sleep as the city is too demanding, too dependent of an offspring. Although you pay fiscal homage to this mother you do not praise it because like most nurturing forces they bewilder you with their speed, they bemuse you with fantastical charts of plotted diagrams depicting frequency, space, length and time and ultimately they deliver you to the same corner you started on without recompense. She takes you where you were supposed to go even if it was not where you wanted to go.

Little did you know it turns out you came all this way to go home again. After all it is the most familiar spaces in even the most exotic of places that endure in your memory long after you forget the foreign nuances. Your stomach rumbles the loudest for the taste that is most comforting and luckily the restaurant is small just like the kitchen you grew up in. The ceiling fans spins round at exactly the same pace aerating the room with the aromas of your grandmother's recipes. The people are warm, friendly, and full like her smile. In keeping with tradition they do not offer but give you a sampling of concoctions you did not even know you wanted. The sauce is the same sauce your mother taught you to make after her mother taught her and you can swear you hear her singing from behind the door on the other side of the room. The tune leaks through the porous grout between the bricks as if there has been a flash flood of memories seeping in that you could never have recalled outside of the city.

Perhaps migrating towards the city is really just like moving further into your own past. You seek out connections you did not previously need in the comfort of your own home far removed from searing New York. In a world reputed for its multiple dangers and temptations it is natural to correlate what you've never seen before to an intimate memory of the past as it is a comfort that becomes a subconscious necessity. In this way you participate in the city by shedding your identity and joining the masses but you remain forever behind glass looking through your own perspective lens while your recollection steers you to delve into your inner self. The ride home is the perfect time to ponder such a theory. The trains are emptier making you feel like half the people you came with were trapped somewhere in the city where they are reliving their past without any success of connecting it to their present. As the day comes to an end and the journey reaches a full circle you start to feel melancholy like you left the place you were supposed to belong.