T Minus Eleven

I am leaving Detroit in eleven days. I have been here for nine years. I moved to Detroit because that's where I wanted to live after I quit my job at a buy-sell-trade clothing store in Ann Arbor in 1996. I also wanted to be near my friends, most of whom lived in Detroit. I quit that job in Ann Arbor, rented an apartment in the Renaud at Second and Hancock, and on the strength of my faith in a job for which I only had an interview, I committed to moving to Detroit. I remember the day I went to look at my apartment, apartment 15, in the Renaud for the first time.

It was early November 1996 and I had been at Zoot's with my friend Aaron, who at that time was running the place. There was a woman who ran a clothing shop in the back of Zoot's; her name was Carol and I do believe that she was certifiably insane. Anyway, I was standing at the counter talking to Aaron about my feeling that I just needed to move out of Ann Arbor, my time there was done, and up walks Carol saying that she is using an apartment in the Renaud, next to hers, as storage and that I might rent it. So, I walked over there with Carol and Aaron, checked the place out, loved its nuances, the weird details, that it was in a very old building, and so I was pretty much sold. I went back to Zoot's, called my parents from the pay-phone in the back hallway across from the bathroom, and I told my mom what I was planning to do. I will say that my parents weren't thrilled that their daughter was Detroit-bound, especially since two months before that I had been car-jacked two blocks from where my new apartment would be. I left that detail out when I told my mom about the place I was planning to rent in the Renaud.

So things moved pretty quickly after that. I did get a job for a mean lady who ran a public relations firm in Troy. I moved into apartment 15 right around Thanksgiving 1996. I was thrilled to be living by myself, in Detroit, and I remember the particular thrill I got when I wrote my address down. It was actually "Detroit," not Ferndale, Hamtramck, Ypsilanti, and it especially was not Royal Oak. I admit that I was proud just about the simple fact that I had a Detroit address and on an overcast winter day there seemed to be nothing more legitimate in this world than the match-up between my seasonal sadness and the entire situation of the city. I really liked that verisimilitude. I finally had chosen where I was living and was compelled to develop my identification with the place; I was proud of it and felt a sense of legitimacy. Now I see that these very same things grow and grow for people . . . to the point where one identifies with the city, or anything else really, to the point that what you are as a person independent of place really fades into the background. I was so determined to develop my place-based sense of self, as a young woman of 22, that now as a 31-one-year old I wonder if I can shed the "place" and keep a strong sense of who I am.

In a way, I am moving out of Detroit in much the same way that I moved to it. I decided, while awash in a sense of panic about continuing the job I had lined up again for this coming academic year, that I simply could not do it again. In a very quick fashion, I quit that job, arranged to move back to New Mexico, ferreted out a job there (which, similar to 1996, wasn't quite lined up yet), told my lovely landlord and -lady here that I was moving, and started to mentally prepare for the move and physically begin the packing. Once I decided that I needed to change the place I was in, the ball was, as it were, rolling and I couldn't, or felt I shouldn't, stop it. I thought that I might feel like, suddenly, what I am doing is wrong for me, but even though I don't know for sure that what lies ahead in New Mexico is right, I know that my time here in Detroit is done. I have decided that it is so.