Unbest

Ani Vrabel on Kanye West’s “Runaway” (from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, 2010)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)

It has been a year of four ZIP codes in three cities, nine different roommates, six months of storing clothes in a suitcase, and more than 200 nights spent on an inflatable bed. It’s been a year of feeling temporary, discovering new neighborhoods, and cramming my belongings into plastic stacking drawers that become a makeshift dresser in unfurnished sublets.

It has also been a year of Kanye West.

Technically, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy became the unofficial soundtrack of my nomadic life at the very end of 2010. It had come out shortly before my sixth and final move of that year, and I put it on simply because I hadn’t gotten the chance to give it a proper listen yet. It made for good background noise while I shoved winter coats into trash bags.

When this past August rolled around and I was packing up and preparing to move from Chicago to New York—my most daunting move yet—I cued up the album again. When I got to “Runaway,” I hit repeat. Again. And again. The repetition kept me calm. The tinny piano notes had a satisfyingly lonely ring to them when I was standing in a room that was slowly becoming more and more bare, and those brief episodes of distortion packed just enough energy to keep me, in my exhausted, end-of-grad-school state, from collapsing onto that blow-up bed.

Although 90% of the lyrics aren’t at all applicable to my life, something about “Baby, I’ve got a plan / Run away as fast as you can” hit home. After all, there are really only two reasons to move to a new city: You’re either seeking out fresh opportunities or leaving behind some dead ends. I was doing both.

The day before I boarded a plane for New York, I had to go to a meeting with a company more than two hours outside of the city, leaving me precious little time to get all my stuff to UPS. I spent the morning hauling everything I owned downstairs to my building’s loading dock, using the small passenger elevator down the hall because the freight elevator by my unit was broken, and eating leftover lo mein with a fork I’d swiped from a convenience store while buying the largest coffee money would get me. I spent the afternoon rushing to make trains, hailing cabs, and trying to do quick mental math because a last-minute change of plans led me to meet with the company’s CFO instead of the person I was prepared to talk to.

That evening, I got back to my apartment feeling more disheveled and discombobulated than I ever had before. I certainly didn’t feel like anyone who was ready to forge a path in the most intimidating city in America. I sat on the hardwood floors of my dark, empty bedroom in the head-to-toe Ann Taylor I’d purchased during a quarter-life crisis. I ate a popsicle because it was all I had left in my fridge. I stared at the two suitcases that held everything I’d need while I slept on a friend’s loveseat and looked for a place of my own. And I listened to Kanye West, because at that point, the only thing resembling a plan I had was to run away as fast as I could and hope for the best.

Ani Vrabel is a writer living in New York (and, by extension, sort of a cliché). So far, everything has worked out just fine. She tweets and blogs.