October 4, 2007
Gilford, New Hampshire
I was 13 years old
I know that I’m going to regret not writing very much in the future, so I apologize but I’ve just been so drained from having to go to school and then several trips back to the amazingness that is New Jersey. Hell, I’ve even written a song (see “I Hate New Hampshire/I Love Jersey” in the back of journal). So, yeah, in the meantime, I’ve been to New Jersey twice, both times having awesome encounters with friends and family but all the same having to return to New Hampshit. I mean, honestly, I don’t have anyone to lie to here, so it’s really the truth when I say…I HATE it here.
I miss everyone, on account of having no one. And that looks like how it’s gonna be. I’ve started school. Gilford Fucking Middle School. And I walked through the front doors with a (semi-) positive attitude. Yet the kids ate me up. Nobody seemed to want to open up to the new kid. No one wants to be “its” first friend. I ended up sitting at “the guys” table in the cafeteria, where I remained for several days. I came home crying everyday. No one liked me. And still after more than a month in school, I honestly don’t have any real friends.
And it’s just so beyond depressing, it’s belittling. I just wish ONE person would open up and be nice. They say people from New Jersey are rude, these New Hampshitheads are so stuck up. They make me nauseous. If they’re not hoity-toity then they’re hoi polloi. And their attitudes are respectively stereotypical. I just wish beyond all else I was back in New Jersey. There’s always a chance.
July 27, 2023
Brooklyn, New York
I am 29 years old
In the parking lot of a Jersey Mikes just a couple months ago, looking out at the mercilessly ugly strip malls of Toms River’s Fischer Boulevard, I turned to my sister Lindsay and said, “I am so happy I don’t live in New Jersey.” Lindsay, our perpetual peacemaker, looked at me and said, “Well, I don’t miss the traffic but…” before trailing off. I was just about mounting my soapbox to further push the agenda when our oldest sibling Jillian joined us back outside, subs in hand for a lunchtime visit with our Nana. Jillian who stayed in New Jersey, already attending college at the time our family moved away to New Hampshire. Jillian who is New Jersey. Fundamentally, wholeheartedly, tribally, ethnically New Jersey. God bless her. It wasn’t that long ago, really, that I too felt the same way. Or, at least, wanted to feel the same way. Desperate to retain kinship with the Garden State despite living some 400 miles away, certain my hostility and my sadness would send the desired message to my parents: “Look what you’ve done! Take me back! This is all your fault! I’m miserable!” A message that, to their ears, probably sounded a lot more like: “I really am your most annoying child!” All this resistance of mine, it felt so productive, so valiant when, really, I was just denying myself so much. And all in the name of believing there was no finer place on earth than New Jersey. How sweet.
Of course, in my defense, it was all I ever knew. Life in New Jersey being all I had to compare to life in New Hampshire. And, in short, they don’t. If I needed any additional reason to spend the rest of my life on the east coast, it’s my lived understanding that no one should be able to drive for 400 miles and stay in one state the whole time. Because a colossal difference those 400 miles make. It was, really and truly, the grand culture shock of my life. A relocation to Pyongyang would’ve rattled me less, I swear. It was like, one moment, I was living in Freehold Raceway Mall’s Armani Exchange and, the next, I was finding a place to sleep in the horse barn of a Shaker village. I grew up with girls who wore 24 karat gold nameplate necklaces and carried legit Coach purses by the third grade and, suddenly, I was confronted with kids who lived in homes without air conditioning or cable television. With the best of spirits, it would have been jarring. But, for me, it was impossible.
I have to laugh at my journaled disclaimer about “not having anyone to lie to here,” figuring I was writing these thoughts in a diary that, ipso facto, would always remain private (ha ha ha!), only for me to declare something I’d long made clear to anyone who’d listen—that I hated New Hampshire. Yes, Brian, we got that! Meanwhile, most everywhere else in this entry, I am just blatantly lying to myself. There were people who were nice to me in Gilford. I did have friends. Sitting at “the guys” table for my first couple days of school was, sadly, the truth but as soon as I remembered who I was and joined the girls instead, I found some people I could really talk to. Girls like Aubrey and Maddie and, in time, thank God, Emily. That is, until my parents let me spend that following summer back in New Jersey, where I lived with my Aunt Patti and went to Belmar beach with Jillian and hung out with a pool of friends that, naturally, was only getting smaller and smaller. Not that that stopped me from telling Emily I didn’t want to hear from her anymore. Texting her at some point that summer to “stop bothering me.” I think that was one of the most hurtful things I’ve ever done to someone. Looking her kindness in the face and saying I didn’t want it. She was New Hampshire born and bred and yet here I was, this Jersey boy in exile, being so rude, so completely stuck up. By freshman year’s end, she was my friend again. We’re still friends today. And I don’t think I’ll ever understand how I deserve that.
My Facebook status the night before graduating from Gilford High was, as I recall, “If it’s bitter at the start then it’s sweeter in the end.” Those in the know will catch the reference. Those who don’t, well, I suggest you get it together. Because while the lyric may have been Madonna’s, the sentiment really was my own. The time was nigh to fly the coop, I’d be attending the college of my choice soon enough, and perhaps because of that out, precisely because of that out, my prayer every night of that summer was for “time to go by so very slowly.” The same God I hoped would stop my family from moving to New Hampshire now being implored to keep me there. This place was home, I could admit that now. All it took was a date on the calendar saying when I had to leave.
“It’s a nice place to visit…” That’s my go-to line, whenever I tell people I grew up in New Hampshire. The implication, of course, is that I don’t think it’s a nice place to live. Still got some demons to exorcize, clearly. Because despite my ambivalence, I do seem to spend a lot of time up there. Four or five times a year, I ride my beloved Northeast Regional quiet car up to Boston before catching a Concord Coachline bus from there to spend, usually, a whole week in Gilford. Where—if I get my way—I don’t do a thing. And by that, I mean I subject myself to an even more fascistic routine than usual. I’ll wake up early enough to catch my mom before she leaves for work, reveling in the familiar ephemera of Live with Kelly! blaring from the television while her curling iron catches fire in the bathroom. With the house to myself, all the while racked with guilt about how much I love having the house to myself, I’ll address the cluttered wreckage of my parents’ empty nest before sitting down to write for a couple hours at the kitchen table. And finally after a cool 8 to 12 mile long walk, an inevitable salmon dinner, and a repeat of Watch What Happens Live, I’ll go to sleep, wake up the next morning, and do it all over again. Happily. It’s not real life but that’s fine by me. After all, I’m only visiting.
Sitting at the bar of a place called The Breeze just a couple weeks ago, looking out at all the little docked boats on Lake Winnipesaukee, I turned to my friend Emily after she asked whether I’d ever move back to New Hampshire and I said, “No.” Committed as I am to my largely lonesome Gilford regimens, it’s rare that she and I are both visiting home at the same time and I wasn’t about to turn down this chance to catch up. It’d been years since we last saw each other but it was the easiest couple hours. Talking about our families and work and, in time, what else, Gilford, New Hampshire itself. Lake Winnipesaukee under a July sunset is no noontime Fischer Boulevard, my dirty vodka martini far more delicious than that Jersey Mikes sub. There’s not a lot of room for fair comparison here, I know that. And yet it was with all the same certainty that I said I couldn’t live in New Hampshire and that I’m happy I don’t live in New Jersey. If 13-year-old me only knew, I think his heart would break. I’m sorry.
By nine o’clock, the bar was closed, hilariously. Out in the parking lot, Emily and I hugged and made tentative promises about seeing each other next week when she’d be staying in New York, the city where I live. It didn’t pan out but, as I told Emily, why push our luck when we had such a good time in Gilford? She got in her mom’s Subaru, I got in my dad’s Hyundai, and we drove away. I pulled out of the lot first but Emily was right behind me. Idling at the same stop signs and hugging all the same curves, we drove past the access to Gilford Beach, past Sawyer’s ice cream shop and the meadows where our pitiful high school football team practiced. I had all the windows down but wasn’t playing any music, listening instead to the sad silence of a small town coming alive, if only falsely, at 40 miles per hour. Emily would be turning left soon enough to get home while I’d need to keep going straight. I stuck out my arm to wave goodbye, blazing in her headlights until they were gone. But for a moment, I kept my arm right where it was, static on the wind and reaching out for something in the dark.