Being a Non-Static Woman

A meditation on March and movement

Mar 02, 2025

1.

Tuesday, 9:45am, West Village, heading to work.

I slow down in front of the Aux Merveilleux De Fred on 8th street, as is my routine, to gaze longingly at the pastries as I pass. This morning, my attention is drawn away from the glistening brioche buns in the window and instead to the bench in front of them where an older woman is sitting with her dog. The dog is large, curly-haired, and friendly-looking and the woman is well-dressed in a fitted jacket of some fine fabric, her gray hair extending in wide curls from below a newsboy-style hat. At the end of the bench opposite her sits a younger woman, near to my own age. She clutches a to-go cup of coffee close to her chest. From the distance separating them, it is clear that the two women do not know each other – have not planned to arrive at the same bench at the same time on the same morning when the sun hits just right– but they are turned slightly towards one another and appear to be chatting.

As I pass, the older woman remarks “I guess you just have to decide what you want out of this whole dating thing”. The young woman laughs. Her long, unbrushed hair falls in front of her face. I resist the urge to stop and listen to the rest of their conversation, or god forbid, pull out my phone and photograph the lovely moment, knowing I would break the spell. Instead, as I turn the corner onto Jane Street, I look back towards them once more. They are drenched in the sure light of morning, the outlines of their bodies seeming to sparkle in the sun. The dog has sat himself contentedly by his owner’s side. The young woman is still giggling. They have nowhere else to be in the world but there.

This is how I know that spring is coming. Moments like this in New York are not winter moments. In the winter, no one lingers. No one sits. No one pauses for an unplanned conversation, delighting in the happenstance of the city and the swarm of unknown lives it contains. Instead, we close ourselves into cocoons of candle-lit bars and dark-wood paneled restaurants. We linger in our apartments, rearranging furniture and art, purchasing new lighting features and cooking utensils as a pastime. On rare excursions outside, we bend our heads against the searing wind, looking only at our own heavy feet, oblivious to all that surrounds.

In the winter, no young woman pauses to sit in front of a golden-bathed patisserie in the middle of the morning on a Tuesday and discuss her love life with a stranger and a dog.

2.

It is the first day over fifty degrees in many months and the particular moment I’ve witnessed seems emblematic of a larger sense of change on the streets. A happy, minuscule disruption has taken place, like the bursting forth of a worm from the earth. As if the great beast of the city has rolled over in its sleep, revealing finally its long-forgotten underside.

3.

It’s March now, which has always felt like a corner month to me; a month in which corners are turned. A shifting of the tide. March feels like a precipice– like coming to the edge of the ski slope before you descend; equal parts adrenaline rush and anticipation.

March also includes one of my favorite calendar dates: March 4th. March fourth is my parents’ dating anniversary, a day the two of them always found particularly symbolic. They imagined the date as a sentence (which, technically it is): “March fourth”, but really, “march forth”, as in: go forward, continue onward, begin again.

March 4th is also the birthday of Hana, my dearest and (arguably) oldest friend. Hana is hard to put into words, despite the fact that the core of our relationship is built around a love of language. I have never known a friend like Hana. She is my partner in poetry, in cats, in green salads and beans and vegetable pasta, in long skirts and vague paintings and melancholy music. She is my athletic and aesthetic teammate and simultaneous rival. She meets me where I am and challenges me to go farther; to think deeper, to speak stronger, to hold the world in tenderness and spite simultaneously.

Hana is a bookish beast. A curious, mysterious creature. She is a woman of corners and curves– a pointy edge of wit softened by wells of deep wisdom, stunningly sharp features doused in a kind of ethereal otherworldliness. When you reach into the black box of her conversation you never know which you will get– the corner or the curve–but it will always be the one you need.

4.

Not too long ago, while discussing the impending changes in our life, Hana wrote me a text saying “we are moving women”, “we are not static”.

I keep thinking about this idea. When I feel lost or aimless, I find solace returning to it, reframing our unceasing unrest as development– the stirrings of something new. I envision us as constantly iterating versions of ourselves; as if the garments of our lives are turning inside out in slow motion; each day revealing a new stitch, a previously unseen thread of color.

The beauty of being simply “moving” and “non-static” or “dynamic”, is that the words themselves do not specify any particular direction or destination. It’s not “moving forward” that’s important in Hana’s explanation but simply the act of moving itself; of fighting stagnancy, of jumping and dancing and flying across the world simply because we can. The pressure to constantly be traveling forward, in one particular linear direction– toward a stable job, a career, a happy family, a settled home– runs deep in American culture. What happened to the joy of moving just for movement’s sake? I want to try stepping sideways for a change. I want to pirouette.

5.

Exactly a week from today I’ll be marching forth on my own adventure after quitting the job I’ve worked for ten months since graduating. The closer I get to the edge of the proverbial cliff of all that comes next (a solo journey across the ocean, life without a paycheck for the foreseeable future, no lease or place of my own), the steeper the fall seems. I can feel my stomach bracing for the drop.

I’m trying to remember what my dad used to tell me about nerves before big sports games– that they are actually a tool; something that can be embraced and harnessed. Nervousness, in the end, is just energy. If I am able to reframe it, that energy may actually be the thing that helps push me over the necessary edge when the time comes.

I am not static. My life will not be static.

6.

Friday. 11:15 a.m, Jane Street, walking with coworkers to the last day of my job.

It’s a clear, nearly warm day. We are wearing our coats open and our hair untied, walking more slowly than in weeks past; happy to elongate this moment of sunshine before we resign inside for the day, hunched over our computers, eyes glazed with screen-rot. I am thinking, vaguely, about the fact that I will never walk this same street with this same intention again. That I won’t be running through the day’s to-dos in my head, grasping blindly for my keys somewhere at the bottom of my bag, hoping that my boss will decide to stay home for the day.

I am trying, I realize, to coax some sort of nostalgia out of myself, since the reality of departure from this stage of life hasn’t really hit me yet. I’ve been desperate to leave but now the leaving is upon me and, like any imagined fantasy, it has lost some of its magic up close. I remind myself why it’s important for me to make this change, while I think about the friends made along the way, the small corner of the west village and its sun-splattered patio, the sick but entertaining drama of my small, bizarre company. The people who– for all their faults– took a chance on me.

A lot is changing, I think, and when I say it aloud later I do so in reference to the weather but I think of much more than just the sun and the temperature and the slowly lengthening evenings.

We’ve turned the final corner of our walk. There is work being done on the street outside the office building. A sprinter van is backed up to a cavernous hole in the asphalt. Two men are standing above it peering down, another is in the hole, only his shoulders and head visible above the street line. They are wearing hard hats and thick, many-pocketed pants, and as we get closer I can hear they are playing music from an aged stereo in the trunk. Just as we pass them, the three men erupt into song together, laughing and swaying as they do so, eyes flicking affectionately towards one another while the sun reflects off their orange safety vests, sending sparks of light into the day.

My heart swells. Their joy is pure and grand and humble. I don’t believe in omens but I decide that this is a good one.

7.

March is the bridge. March is the fine edge of a book page, occasionally blood-letting when handled carelessly. Some Marchs are the paper cut, others are the soft breeze of the page turning; falling softly upon the previous chapter, revealing the next.

March is The Sound of Music. It’s Little Women, Jo March, who I might have liked to have been named after. March is strong willed girls and long skirts moving through wispy grasses, still damp with winter’s dew. March is tall boots and short dresses and sudden, flustering rainstorms that remind us of our impermanence; the ability of it all to be washed away.

8.

Today, writing this, March 1st, I am happy to be at home. Happy to be in love. Supremely content with the world exactly as it presents itself to me in the morning, in the few happy minutes before I remember to be afraid. In a week, I’ll be in the midst of that fear; far from the man I love and alone without a paycheck on a stranger’s farm in a country where– hard as I try– I still cannot speak the language.

And, hopefully, I’ll be waking to the sound of birds and horses and the quiet rumblings of spring stirring; of olives branches rustling against one another in the breeze and children laughing in the yard. I can almost hear it now. Maybe I’ll be sleeping deeply. Maybe I’ll be ripe with vitamin D and new ideas and too much time in which to write them.

So, I will march on. March forth. March.