On Five Years in New York City
"Listening to all the reasons she hates New York, I never felt more certain this is exactly where I want to be."
November 2, 2018
New York, New York
I was 24 years old
I texted Victoria to see if she was up to anything. She’d just taken her GREs the night before so I was eager to celebrate that. I offered to meet up somewhere near her and she said that wasn’t necessary, but I insisted. Telling her, sincerely, that I was still new enough to the city that a train ride as long as that (from Bed-Stuy to Inwood) would be a novelty. God laughs. On the A, in between 23rd and 34th, the train came to a pretty abrupt halt. Then the conductor comes on overhead, saying, “Someone pulled the emergency brake, we need to inspect all the cars before moving forward.” Thank you, SJP: I never leave the house without a book (Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore—she’s, as per usual, rocking my world). And thankfully I did, because we were stopped for 30 minutes. Finally the conductor announced we’re gonna move ahead and a woman further down the train car says, exuberantly, “Okay!” Most of us laughed. It was cute, this little communal thing. A real “I Love New York!!!” moment after thirty minutes of feeling like, “Come ON, New York!!!”
Finally got to Victoria at this wine bar where, God bless, she’d been chatting all the while with these Baby Boomer couples at the neighboring table. She was in the bathroom when I arrived so we got to have a kind of natural greeting. She looked beautiful. She is beautiful. She told me I was the calmest she’s ever seen me. All was good for the first glass. Not the case by our second round. Things just got progressively more intense. Talking about friendships maintained since college or, really, the friendships not maintained. Telling me she was never confident in our friendship, that she never knew what I really thought of her, that she always worried I only hung out with her on nights no one else was available. And then she got to talking about all the reasons she doesn’t like living in New York, doesn’t like New Yorkers, how she never hangs out with her coworkers and all the ways that her boyfriend’s a liar. Just, you know, dark stuff.
Who knows, maybe I’ll get to a place where I harbor such contempt for this city. But I couldn’t help but feel like she wasn’t really helping herself in any of these scenarios. But what do I know? What I do know, what I walked away from this night thinking? I love New York.
We bid our adieus, promising to go to the Met with each other soon and I got on the A train for my hour-plus commute home. Feeling totally enlivened. Not at all weighed down by that relatively heavy evening but instead completely grateful for the experience I’m having so far. Because despite some of my fears, I find myself—not always, but not rarely either—really loving New York. Watching that woman standing up on the J, unabashedly dancing by herself before getting off at Kosciuszko and dancing the whole way down the platform. Arianna Huffington crossing the sidewalk in front of me moments after I’d been talking about her. And a million other things I need to make note of, in fear of forgetting.
I don’t want to jinx myself but I deferred the dream of getting here for so long. I’ve longed for New York for so long. Loved it and feared it from afar for years. Building this web of expectations and hopes that almost by definition could inevitably be destroyed by the reality of being here. But taking that A train home, it felt like exactly that. A train ride home.
How naive I might come across, looking back on this sentiment years from now but who knows. Maybe not. I have found the people of this city to be so warm and welcoming. I’ve found New York to rise up to meet me, in even the smallest moments of beauty. Despite the filth and the noise and everything else. Or maybe because of it. In addition to it. Whatever else. Listening to all the reasons she hates New York, I never felt more certain that this is exactly where I want to be.
Too busy, too crazy, too hot, too cold, too late, I’m sold, again, on NYC. (For now…)
October 4, 2023
Brooklyn, New York
I am 29 years old
I know this amazing New York woman, we work together, let’s call her Esther. Seventy-something years old and retired after decades of teaching in public schools, she really only has this job at the museum, in her words, to “stay relevant.” She enjoys a cigarette between tours and constantly leaves a Diet Coke somewhere in her wake, the can branded with her signature red lipsticked kiss. Somedays, she’s in a studded leather jacket. Other days, she’s got on this Vivenne Westwood-looking denim number with a tattered Stone Pony t-shirt safety pinned onto the back. More than once, I’ve seen her drag her purse right on the ground. She’s fabulous. She’s hysterical. Warmer than the afternoon. And Esther’s got stories. She’s had this same neighbor living across from her for years now, out in Queens. “She calls me Jezebel. At my age?! That’s a compliment!” She’s miserable, this neighbor, just as mean as can be. And Esther is telling me all about her one day, getting to the end of her story with a sincerely felt sigh, “But you know, she suffers because she has to exist in her own skin. Every day—I pray for her death.” My heart skipped a beat. From most people, such a declaration would sound horrible. A cruel, even dangerous thing to say. But not from Esther. From Esther, it sounded exactly as it was intended. Like a blessing. And that? That takes a New Yorker.
I’m halfway there, according to some. Five years ago, on October 3rd, I moved to New York. The most popular metric about this sort of thing commands ten years living in New York City before deservedly taking on the title of “New Yorker.” For what it’s worth, I disagree. In my experience, the only people who really live and die by this rule are fellow transplants. All the guys and dolls who survived the brutal destruction of their 20something dreams and nevertheless chose to stick around, bitterly. Rapidly approaching 30 years old myself, I’ll reserve my judgments. Especially since I understand that impulse, that need to gatekeep this city from all the people who just come and go. I’m thinking of a specific kind of visitor to the museum, the elder Millennials in carpenter pants and geometric hairdos who answer my question of “Where do you live?” with, “Well, we’re up in Hudson now but! we lived in the city for a long time.” Smiling, I say to them, “Lovely.” Smirking, I think to myself, “Quitter.”
Before moving here, I’d visit once or twice a year. Twenty-five dollar round-trip MegaBus tickets shuttling me down from Boston for weekend trips I often called my “sex pilgrimages.” Because while I may have lost my virginity at a cool 22 years old, at least I did it in New York City. Not just anyone can say that! (Or not just anyone who otherwise lived in Boston.) All that to say, I was familiar with New York. Fully accustomed to hitting those steaming summer streets, walking from the Met to Battery Park, from the Brooklyn Bridge to that West Village pizza place that had Julianne Moore’s favorite slice in the city, according to the clipping from a 2002 issue of New York magazine framed on the wall. These trips, they were a marathon, thrilling and invigorating and go!-go!-go! My finger lodged in the electric socket right up until it was time to leave. Now, considering I’d spent all my sullen adolescence telling anyone who’d listen that “New Hampshire is a pretty place to visit but not to live,” I should have known better. Understanding that a life in New York was bound to be very different from a visit, let alone a visit with the sole purpose of getting laid.
Don’t mistake me, arriving in New York City (read: my sublet in Bed-Stuy), it was one of the greatest thrills I will ever know. I hope I never forget how sublimely exciting it felt that morning on the Amtrak, when the conductor announced overhead, “Next stop, Penn Station-New York City. Next stop: New York City.” Just the thought of it puts a teardrop in my throat. Walking up from the bowels of Penn, with nothing more than the clothes and ripping-at-the-seams duffel bag on my back, I look up from the sidewalk and see the Empire State Building. A tableau that, in the movie of my life, would feel too cheesy to be true. And yet. My first month in New York was a blur of faces and places, of people I’d otherwise only known on the Internet inviting me out for a celebratory drink. Welcome to New York, over and over and over. My second day here, I saw A Star Is Born in theaters with a boy named Austin who was much taller in real life than I expected. He’d only keep surprising me. Soon enough, I’d be saying “I love you” for the first time and accepting a certain job at the museum and signing a lease for a Bushwick apartment. By all accounts, I’d made it here. So as Liza would warble: I could make it anywhere. And soon enough, said “anywhere” felt more and more appealing.
I hate admitting this. It’s with deep—and deserved—shame that I do. But by my first summer here, I no longer loved New York. It was a trying time. Dogs were barking day and night outside my window. The wifi wouldn’t reach my bedroom and our shower didn’t have a curtain and I’d stopped flinching at the sight of cockroaches in our kitchen sink. I hated all my clothes, feeling brutally scorned anytime my boyfriend so much as glanced at a cute boy on the L. Sunshine was burning without a greenspace near enough, let alone clean enough, for my tanning standards. Hand washing habits that, once upon a time, were just “fussy” now edged upon “compulsive.” And yet I still got strep throat five times in four months. A literally poor man’s Howard Hughes, one day at a time feeling more and more repulsed by the sights and sounds of a city I’d longed for all my life. I had no intention to move away, my attachment style, as I was learning, far too “anxious” to permit such a thing. Not that that stopped me from dreaming of a life somewhere peaceful, somewhere pristine. “Maybe Philadelphia,” I’d think to myself, dead serious. Stopping short of admitting just how much I missed that lame little City Upon a Puritanical Hill I’d known and loved for the last six years. That would be a kind of self-awareness one step too far. Instead, I accepted my lot. I was to live in New York. Whether I liked it or not!
But things changed. Namely, the entire world. Moving in with Austin to hunker down together in his apartment, we waited out something that, in fact, would never end. Birdsong had never sounded so loud, that’s what I remember most. That and cooking a different dinner each and every night. Like the tenement women I’d talk about on my tours—before we all got laid off and after our union contract demanded our rehiring, that is—my New York life had gone domestic. I was housebound, and loved it. And even once the world opened back up, it would take me a while to let all that go. A readjustment made a little easier by the fact we were still living together, along with a roommate who qualifies, bar none, as The Coolest Girl in New York City, all of us in a brownstone in Clinton Hill. It’s a dream come true. When I was living in Bushwick, I used to go on these long walks across Bed-Stuy, always en route to the same neighborhood for my final destination, as documented in an Instagram Story from my first fateful month in New York, where I say to my front-facing camera, “You know, here I am, walking around the almost tragically beautiful Clinton Hill and I had the thought, ‘The only thing standing in the way of me calling a place like this home…is everything.’” Surprise surprise. Moving in at a time when most people were still moving out, the rent was kind of a steal. Relatively. But just like that, I was back in love with New York City. And all it took was swapping Bushwick for one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I’m not proud about that. But I am happy.
It doesn’t take much. Perhaps I’m a man of simple pleasures, I don’t know, but it never feels simple, those moments when I’m standing on a street corner, or dancing through the foot traffic of a midtown crowd, or watching as a put-together woman on a park bench eats a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream using the carton’s lid, and I think to myself, “I live in the most exciting place on planet earth.” With everything I have, I know that to be true. It’s not the only place, but it is the best. A belief that never rings truer than when I leave, and I talk to friends and family who live anywhere else, friends and family that I love and respect who, God bless them, just don’t get it. Everyone’s a critic of New York, that’s one thing—the entitlement people feel to declare just how much they hate the place I live, it’s obnoxious but it’s nothing new. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What they don’t get is that feeling I have everytime I come back here, everytime I come back home, and I’m on the subway and looking around at all the different faces, all these beautiful New York faces, and I could just about burst into song. When I’m recounting some detail of my trip to my boyfriend or our roommate and they laugh at just the right thing, at something no one else had recognized as funny. Or when I’m listening to my coworker tell me about praying for her neighbor’s death and I understand it as a blessing. It takes a New Yorker. I’m on my way.