MY VIEW
Growing while changing course -- and continent
RACHEL PEARSON

You know this story: Three weeks after I turned 17, I flew to Madrid to be an exchange student for a year. Nobody met me at the airport. I did not speak Spanish. I took my first subway into my first city, and emerged at the Puerta del Sol, where I was almost flattened by joy. Then almost by a taxi. I found a room to stay in, took a nap, and then walked into the large unknown. That was six-and-a-half years ago.

The ghost of the person I was then has been bothering me again.

Three days after this Christmas, I flew to New York and spent five hours cleaning out my apartment. I closed my account at the video store, turned in all my library books, and left my plant, Plant, to live or die as my old roommate Dena wills it. I have seen Dena's Mexican fortune tree, and I am sad to report that hopes are not high for Plant.

At 7:10 that evening, I was the last person in the UPS store. I mailed six large boxes of books and clothes and drawings back to Port Aransas. S o m e o f t h e clothes had been mailed to me only a couple of months before.

Back at the apartment, I s w e p t a n d mopped, and left a few crappy mementos of myself: A box of light bulbs, a collection of short stories by David Foster Wallace, and a coffee can half-full of pennies and nickels. Also, a map with a red heart drawn over Austin, Texas. Backpack on, I went down the familiar narrow stairs one last time, peeked at the concrete courtyard, opened and shut my mailbox in the lobby.

There are things that I will miss about New York.

I'll miss walking through the Columbia campus at night, with the beautiful old buildings all lit up like freshly-landed space ships. I wanted to see it snow in New York, and I never did. And I'll miss all the weird art (three basketballs floating in an aquarium?) I could see for free at the MOMA, the tyrannosaurus skeletons regarding each other across an aisle of the natural history museum, and eating take-out Japanese noodle soup in Central Park.

A lot of things are good about New York, but I didn't want to stay there.

I've spent a long time, months, lurching back and forth about whether grad school was worth all the debt and the years, and I've ended up with a few sound reasons wrapped around what is really a deep gut feeling of wanting to leave.

The reasons are true. I feel uncomfortable about writing being an academic industry, and I don't want to go into any of the editing or academic careers writing school seemed to funnel its deeply-in-debt graduates towards. I want instead to

learn a useful trade or two, and write with my whole heart in front of me. Writing school seemed to have less and less to do with writing…

But these reasons are mostly a way of explaining a deep feeling of go, go, go. Get out of school and go be in the world.

It's that wandering ghost again, wild-eyed and skinny, tugging at my hair.

That night, I slept at my good friend Caitlin's house. The following morning, I flew to London. In two weeks, Nick and I are moving to Madrid, where we have been hired to work as storytellers for an Englishlanguage theatre troupe. We will go from school to school, working as a team, telling stories to children.

We'll find an apartment somewhere in the city center, near the Puerta del Sol where, six-and-a-half years ago, I walked stunned into the sunlit street.

That week, I forgot to eat for so long that, when finally I was fed, I threw up.

I almost cannot imagine that anyone was ever as young as I was, that whole year.

Rachel Pearson is a graduate of Port Aransas High School and The University of Texas at Austin. She may be reached via e-mail at rachelmpearson@gmail.com.