Fourth of July in Boston did feel rather colonial as I couldn’t help but imagine the harbor fireworks were a spray of cannons discharging. I sat on the edge of a wharf in Charlestown in a men’s Bugatchi shirt from the 90s I bought earlier that day. The butterscotch NY plates on my car gave me away; however, not long ago I was just another anonymous teenager in New England with an insufficient winter coat and an unmanageable caffeine addiction.
When I moved to Boston I realized I might never settle for a landlocked home again. Something about the blackness of the Atlantic ocean being an arm’s length away gave life on the coast a liminal undertone. To some degree, and I think as far as an individual pushes it, life holds endless liminal space. Liminality could be my last name.
It first occurred to me while on stage at The Burren the night before – Boston had never seen me this way. I’ve been to New York and back, so to speak, and New Yorkers are anything but nonchalant when they call their city “hell.” I felt like the same woman, but with bigger muscles, better battle gear, and so much more music.
I imagined my 18-year-old-self sitting beside me on the dock and remembered what she used to feel walking in Cambridge in the autumn, burrowed in the basement practice rooms on Commonwealth Avenue, waking up to the glow of the low winter sun on buildings and clouds through a North-facing window. After the fireworks her and I picked up sushi in Somerville and retreated to our victorian accommodation for a swim in the jacuzzi. So it goes and while it was truly not my plan, I returned to New York reunited with a few slivers of myself that got split-off while surviving 1 or 4 anxious winters in New England.