28 Carriages

As Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter era begins to wind down, I have found myself returning to one song more than any other: 16 Carriages.

I have listened to the album in full. I have admired the ambition of it, the genre play, the symbolism, and the larger cultural statement Beyoncé was making. But 16 Carriages has stayed with me in a way the others have not. It is one of the few songs I have ever heard that felt less like listening and more like remembering. From the first time I heard it, I recognized something in it that I could not quite name at first, only that it sounded familiar. It sounded like movement under pressure. It sounded like years spent carrying expectations while waiting for life to become clearer. It sounded, in many ways, like my own adulthood.

The song immediately brought me back to the bus ride that brought me to New York City.

I was twenty-eight years old when I left for New York with six hundred dollars in my bank account, one suitcase, and a job waiting for me when I arrived. Having a job made the move sound responsible whenever I explained it to other people, but responsibility and certainty are not the same thing. I was not certain about anything except that I could no longer remain where I was and continue pretending that my life felt right to me.

I remember sitting by the window for most of the ride and watching the highway pass in long stretches of gray, trying to convince myself that I was doing something brave rather than something desperate. There is a peculiar loneliness that comes with relocating your life as an adult. Once the decision has been made, there is no more planning to distract you. There is only the quiet understanding that you are moving toward consequences you cannot fully predict.

At twenty-eight, I needed New York to become more than a new address. I needed it to become a turning point.

By then, I had grown deeply dissatisfied with the shape of my own life. Nothing around me had collapsed in any dramatic way, which made the feeling harder to explain, but inwardly I felt stalled. I felt as though I had spent too much time waiting for clarity, waiting for confidence, and waiting for some visible indication that I was becoming the person I had imagined I would be. Instead, I felt stuck in familiar routines, familiar disappointments, and a familiar sense that everyone else seemed to be moving through adulthood with far more certainty than I possessed.

New York began to look like an answer to that discomfort. I believed that a city built on ambition might force me into my own. I believed that leaving would make me sharper, more focused, and more assured. More than anything, I believed that the move would become the success story I needed it to be.

That belief carried an enormous amount of pressure.

I have often felt as though I was raised to take it all home. I have carried that feeling for most of my life: the sense that I was supposed to leave, figure it out, and eventually return with proof that all of the sacrifice, expectation, and faith attached to me had produced something worthwhile. Whether anyone says that to you directly almost does not matter. Once you internalize it, it becomes part of the way you move through the world. Success begins to feel less like desire and more like obligation.

I took that obligation with me to New York.

I had not come to New York simply to work a job and pay rent. I had come here expecting the city to make sense of me. I expected that if I worked hard enough and sacrificed enough, the confusion I had been carrying would eventually organize itself into something that looked like progress. I thought New York would fix me, or at the very least make me feel as though I was finally moving in the right direction.

Instead, I arrived with all of the same uncertainty I had hoped to leave behind.

For the first two weeks, I stayed with a friend while I searched for an apartment. I spent those days learning train lines, checking apartment listings, and trying not to think too often about how quickly six hundred dollars could disappear in New York City. Eventually I found a place in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where my early years in the city began.

Those years were not glamorous, though I often spoke about them as though they were. What I remember most clearly now is not some romanticized image of becoming young in New York, but the routine mechanics of survival. I remember small paychecks and careful budgeting. I remember long commutes and cheap groceries. I remember trying to make tiny living spaces feel temporary enough that I did not have to admit how unsettled I felt. I remember calling family and friends and speaking with enough optimism in my voice to make it sound as though everything was unfolding exactly as planned.

Very little felt as planned.

I was grateful to have employment, but a paycheck does not automatically create peace. I was living independently, but independence did not automatically create confidence. I had done the thing I thought would transform me, and yet I often felt exactly as uncertain as I had before, only now I was uncertain in New York.

That realization was difficult for me because I had attached so much meaning to the move itself. I had treated relocation as though it were synonymous with reinvention. I assumed that once I got here, some internal shift would naturally follow. I thought I would feel bolder. I thought I would feel more secure. I thought that choosing myself in such a visible way would make me feel more convinced of who I was.

Instead, I spent those first several years quietly worried that New York would not become the success story I had promised myself.

That fear sat underneath everything.

And that is why 16 Carriages feels so personal to me.

Beyoncé’s song is full of movement, but it is not triumphant movement. It is tired movement. It is the sound of someone carrying the weight of expectation while time keeps moving anyway. Every time I hear it, I think about how much of my own adulthood has felt exactly like that. Moving, working, sacrificing, insisting that the next year will feel more settled than this one, and slowly realizing that transition can become its own era of your life if you are not careful.

When she sings about carriages driving away, I hear years.

I hear the years I spent believing the next paycheck, the next apartment, the next promotion, or the next version of myself would finally make New York feel like arrival instead of transit. I hear the years I spent carrying hope and panic in equal measure. I hear the years I kept calling temporary because I could not bear the thought that uncertainty might be more formative than brief.

I have never related to a song more because I know what it means to keep moving while privately wondering when all of that movement will begin to feel meaningful.

I know what it means to choose yourself and still feel overwhelmed by the consequences of that choice.

I know what it means to build a life outwardly while inwardly waiting for the confidence to catch up.

Most of all, I know what it means to spend years asking a place, a job, or a new chapter to fix something that was always going to require much slower work.

That is the harder lesson New York gave me, and perhaps the harder lesson this song reflects back to me now. No city can rescue you from yourself. No bold decision automatically becomes a success story just because it was brave enough to make. Sometimes all you get at first is movement. Sometimes all you get is proof that you were willing to go.

As the Cowboy Carter era comes to an end, I think that is what 16 Carriages leaves me reflecting on most: not simply the decision to leave, but the long and often invisible years that come after leaving, when you are still carrying the same dreams, the same pressure, and the same hope that all of it will eventually make sense.

I was twenty-eight when I boarded that bus believing movement and transformation were the same thing.

I know now they are not.

Some transformations take much longer than the ride.