More snippets of my life

I moved to New York City when I was 18 years old, and my vision of myself as an adventure-bound girl leaping into a world of excitement and exhilaration died with the setting sun after my first day in Manhattan. Left standing on a street corner with my parents and my luggage at 8 o’clock at night, due to an internet booking mishap in which the “hotel” we’d arranged for was, in reality, a youth hostile, I spent my first night at the nearest cheap hotel.
Alone in a cold, sterile room with no bathroom, it wasn’t much of an improvement upon the youth hostile, but at least my parents were slightly more comfortable. Hearing an uncomfortably loud scream, I leaped towards the door and locked it. Suddenly I felt like a female Tom Hanks in “Big”- thrust from the familiar in every sense, embarrassed by the fact that as I hesitantly sat on the squeaky twin bed I was to sleep on, tears sprang to my eyes and I craved a bigger comforter with which to bury myself, if only until dawn. A harsh overhead light in the room illuminated every speck of dirt, and a crooked mirror near the door revealed my deflated and anxious expression which I wryly hoped might wipe off with my makeup. I couldn’t bear to turn the solitary light off even as I slept, but the growing list of the next day’s tasks, and my stirring at every siren, slammed door, and stumbling drunkard, granted me little respite.
My parents stayed in the same hotel – undoubtedly sleeping even less than I. We sensed, all of us, that they would soon be torn infinitely from me, rendered helpless and ignorant of the unimaginable dangers I would face. I could picture them, two floors below, repelled by the environment but calmly putting on their pajamas, my mother reminding my father that I was here to attend an upper-crust school and, although we all yearned to return to northern California to my sister – where, reunited, we would go home in familial bliss – we were still “very, very lucky.”

“There’s no way I’m leaving you in this hell-hole,” my father choked the next morning, as the hour when they would return to their – our­ – lovely suburban home loomed near. That blissfully isolated world in which I had been raised had already faded into a far off fairy-tale where chirping canaries replaced scuttling cockroaches and sewer rats, where soccer moms drove their immaculate children around with a cheerful smile and homeless men didn’t stalk strolling families for blocks, howling obscenities, as had happened to us the night before.
I looked at my parents with guilt. I had wanted to come to New York; they didn’t belong here, and their anxious faces had aged overnight; my mother had enormous bags under her eyes and I could have sworn my father’s hair had a gray streak I had never seen before. I knew they didn’t understand why we were here, and more than ever, they were hurt by it. Neither one had gone to college; both had grown up in the Bay Area and raised their family a stone’s throw away from their childhood homes. Now here I was, still in my teens and abandoning them for a “hell-hole” 3,000 miles away. Ever-emotional, ignoring the work and achievements it had taken to win a scholarship from University X, as well as the fact that New York was bigger than the mile or so that had presented such an unfortunate impression to my parents, I felt selfish and cruel.