The Two Selves of Beth Jones

The Two Selves of Beth Jones

Beth Jones was twenty-five when she moved from Upstate to Manhattan. She told everyone it was for work. Her job in marketing had promoted her to the New York office, but really, it was to slip into another life, one she imagined more refined, faster, brighter. She could walk down streets lit in a permanent yellow glow and feel, for a moment, like she had become the woman she saw on glossy magazine covers: deliberate, ambitious, and leaning always toward the next opportunity.

But whenever she came back home, the other Beth, the townie version, slipped back into her skin like an old cardigan. It was automatic. She didn’t mean for it to happen, but the transformation was instant. The way her vowels flattened, how she fell into gossip at a dive bar, her body easing into familiarity she never allowed herself in Manhattan.

She knew both versions were real. That was the problem.

In Manhattan, Beth’s life unfolded in curated moments. Those moments took the shape of rooftop bars, where she wore sharp-shouldered blazers, borrowed confidence, and laughed too loudly at jokes she only half understood. She told people she was from “upstate,” a word that rolled off her tongue like an apologetic shrug.

She rented a studio apartment barely bigger than her old bedroom, with a window that opened to the back of another building, all brick and fire escapes. She filled it with thrifted glassware, books she hadn’t read, and a vase of peonies she replaced weekly even when money was tight. In this version of her life, Beth was sleek, composed, someone her high school friends wouldn’t recognize. That was the point.

But when she returned home, even just for a weekend, her edges softened. She’d step into the kitchen of her childhood house and instantly be the girl who wore sweatshirts with frayed cuffs, who drove down Erie Boulevard blasting the same songs from her teenage year and early twenties. She’d stand in line a corner and see faces she once kissed, faces she once fought with, and faces that hadn’t left town.

They looked at her with a kind of dual recognition. They knew exactly who she was, and yet they squinted at the version of her they didn’t quite understand.

Beth thought of herself as two reels of film running at the same time. In one, she leaned over the East River railing, smoke rising from her hand, hair pressed sleek by humidity, promising herself that she belonged there. In the other, she was barefoot on a porch in Syracuse, a beer bottle sweating in her palm, laughing with her brother about people they both knew too well.

Sometimes, the reels overlapped. She’d find herself in Manhattan telling someone about the latest murder on the north side and her voice would catch on a word so local it betrayed her. Other times, in Syracuse, she’d talk about her “network,” about the grind, about deadlines that didn’t exist for anyone else in the room. Each world leaked into the other, and she wondered if maybe she wasn’t two versions at all, but one blurred whole.

The question that haunted her wasn’t which version was “true.” It was: what if both were temporary?

One night in Syracuse, Beth sat in her parked car outside the diner she’d been going to since she was a teenager. Inside, the lights were harsh, the booths the same red vinyl they had always been. She watched two high school girls in hoodies rush in, laughing, a vision of her own past. She thought of herself at their age, telling anyone who would listen that she would leave, that she would get out.

And she had. She had gotten out. But “getting out” had only made her realize how much of her still belonged to this place. The cadence of her speech. The way she considered a brutal blizzard to be only a "dusting." The part of her that thought of Wegmans as holy ground.

Later, back in Manhattan, she sat at a wine bar with coworkers. A man leaned across the table, asking where she was from. She opened her mouth, ready to say “upstate,” but instead said, “Syracuse.” The word landed heavy, unpolished, and yet it felt truer than anything else she could have said.

She saw in his eyes that he had no map for the place, no reference point. But she didn’t rush to explain. She let it stand.

Beth realized, slowly, that both versions of herself wanted the same thing. Belonging. In Syracuse, it came from history; people knowing her last name, knowing which high school she went to, who her family was. In Manhattan, it came from possibility. The chance to step into rooms where no one had decided her story yet.

Neither version was more authentic than the other. Both were Beth. Both were hungry. Both were reaching toward a life that could hold them completely.

And maybe she’d never get there. Maybe she would always live in the seam between the two. But she began to think that the seam itself—the overlap, the blur, the haunting—was its own kind of home.