September 25th, 2015 - Emily Matis

I’d been in New York since I was eighteen, but at twenty-six I left for New Mexico. When people asked why, I said, “I just really like turquoise.” The truth was I didn’t know exactly why—I only knew I wanted a different kind of life. Ten years ago, I was one year out of New York and one year into living in Albuquerque. My one-bedroom apartment felt like luxury, with its washer, dryer, and dishwasher. The complex sat at the base of the Sandias, with an arroyo out back where I walked my dog. On certain early mornings, I could see the city, the mountains, the moon setting, and the sun rising all at once.

Two years before I left New York, Hurricane Sandy hit. My best friend and I lived in the East Village and didn’t know how to prepare for natural disasters, so we made a fridge full of couscous. When we lost power, we walked to the FDR to see the East River, but there was no distinction between river and highway—the river was the highway. Then we went to neighborhood bars, played board games by candlelight, drank warm beer, and ate our couscous with marinara sauce. In the morning we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge where life went on mostly unchanged, and it all felt a little like playing a game, something like Hide and Seek, because life couldn’t really have changed. It couldn’t really just be water which could wash it all away.

A year after Sandy, I was stuck in traffic on the FDR. I looked at the river, the congestion, the narrow bridge, a man in the car beside me with dark glasses and an open book spread across the steering wheel, and thought: there’s no way we’d make it out of here. When I told this story to a man in New Mexico, he looked at me and said, “Oh, you’re a prepper. There’s a lot of those here.” I didn’t think I was a prepper, but it felt nice having a reason for being there.

In New Mexico, I drove the longest stretches I’d ever seen without a gas station, an exit sign, a building, a tree. Some people who visited said, “There’s nothing to see out here,” and other people said, “What are you talking about? You can see everything from here.”

Once, before I left New York, I was high in a cab on the way to the airport and staring very hard at powerlines, train tracks, rooftops, and high-rises. I got freaked out because all I saw were right angles and straight lines, and I thought there had to be another shape out there somewhere. In New Mexico, there were still right angles and straight lines, but they were so small compared to the sky, and that felt like the correct proportion of the rest of the universe to human life. New York sometimes felt like a snow globe. Inside it, it was so easy to forget there was a world outside.

When I left New York, I went to Albuquerque, then Hawaii, then back to Albuquerque. Somewhere in that time, an Uber driver who had just moved to Albuquerque from Denver told me all he really wanted to do in this life was to experience the Earth in all its forms. He said Denver was his mountain life, Albuquerque his desert life, and then he’d have some other life. Maybe that’s what I was doing too. I liked his theory of life, but I had my own theories too.

The last three years I was in New York, I was in graduate school for psychology and wondering about the ways our environment shapes our behavior and how that behavior shapes our understanding of our personalities, which shapes our belief of the person we are and the lives we might lead. Some psychological theories say personality is a myth and there are no innate traits determining the person we will be, because it’s all just roles we take on based on what our environment needs us to be. These theories state that the whole idea of an innate, consistent personality across time is a myth predicated on our environment and the roles we serve in those environments remaining static over time. I think I left New York because I wanted to get away from straight lines and the influence of a singular environment’s hold on the idea of the person I was or the life I might lead. Ten years ago, I was most afraid of creating a permanent false idea of the person I am based on what roles the people around me needed me to be.

In September of 2015, I was about to end another relationship, was on the verge of moving yet again, but remembered standing on the beach, watching the tide come out and in, and thinking: sometimes there’s so little time in a woman’s life when she isn’t defined by her role in another person’s life. At that point, I was twenty-seven and a year into feeling like I was in that precious time that was just mine. I looked at the water under my feet and wanted for that time to seep into me, for it to stretch and expand until I could define for myself the person I was, the roles I would take on, and the lives I would lead.

In the past ten years, I am most grateful for the environments that have provided me the space to figure out my own definition of what life could be. In a week, I’ll be moving back to New York, and it feels like maybe all those straight lines I felt trapped inside were spirals I couldn’t yet see.

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Photo by Samia Zaidi

Emily Mathis is a writer and dancer. Her essay, "Men Smoking," was the 2024 nonfiction winner of Sonora Review's The Erotic contest. Additional essays have been finalists for contests through The Sewanee Review, Fourth Genre, North American Review, Tucson Festival of Books, and Epiphany and have recently appeared in Sonora Review, Hunger Mountain, Epiphany, Los Angeles Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and others. Her debut essay collection was longlisted for the 2024 Miami Emerging Writers' Fellowship and named a semi-finalist for the 2025 Hudson Prize. She is seeking publication for her debut essay collection and working on a novel. Find her at emilymathiswriting.com or on Instagram @emily_a_mathis.