Note: This is a repost of the audio essay I uploaded to my podcast feed. I’m doing some revamping on the podcast, so this has been moved to my newsletter.
I always forget how much I love New York City until I’m back on its streets.
It’s been nearly a decade since I left, and there’s a lot I’ve forgotten in the years away. The ticket protocol on NJ Transit trains. The routes and schedules I could once see imprinted on the backs of my eyelids as I went to sleep. The exact decibel and magnitude of said trains screaming through the tunnel beneath the Hudson toward New York Penn—loud, deafening, grating, harsh. It makes me wish I were wearing my noise-canceling headphones.
But that’s not the point of the city. The point of the city—always “the city,” occasionally “New York,” but never “NYC”—is to be overstimulated. Overwhelmed. There is always so much happening, so many people, so many sights, so many sounds, smells, stimuli. New York is a nightclub turned urban center, where the throb and thrum of the bass drowns out all conscious thought. I used to say that New York was the best place to be alone, surrounded by millions of your closest, most personal strangers. Ten years later, I’m glad to see it still is.
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Bear and I are in town for the wedding of a college friend—his friend, although Bear and I did go to college together. He’s kept in better touch with his college friends than I have mine, but he’s that sort of person. The night before, we flew into Newark to stay with his parents in Jersey, and he went off to see his old high school buddies while I decided to catch up on sleep. The next morning, we took the train into the city, a trip both he and I have made more times than we can count. It doesn’t quite feel as though we’re kids again, but it’s close.
Once in New York, Bear and I emerge from the lower tracks into Penn Station proper, where I’m immediately greeted by Tiecoon. For as long as I had lived in New York, and likely even longer before that, Tiecoon—spelled T-I-E-C-O-O-N—has been operating out of Penn Station, selling ties to commuters in need of last minute accessories. Next to Tiecoon is élégance, its hosiery sister, garish leggings and tights and stockings on display on mannequin legs in the window. It warms my heart to see that these institutions have survived the pandemic. Oceans rise and empires fall, but Tiecoon will endure forever.
The hotel is in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a neighborhood with which I’m not especially familiar, although I have a vague idea of where it is. We could take a cab to our hotel, but in truth, that thought never once crosses our minds. Bear and I love public transportation; what we miss most about the cities we have lived in was the ability to forget we had a car. I can still dredge up the old MTA subway map from the depths of my memory, and soon we’re traversing the labyrinthine corridors beneath 34th St in search of the blue line—the A to Far Rockaway. We immediately head to the Metrocard kiosk for a $20 card.
“How much is it now for a single ride now?” I ask.
“$2.75,” Bear replies.
The fare hasn’t increased at all since I’ve left, which amazes me. It was $2.00 when I first moved to the city in 2003. It was $2.75 by the time I left in 2013. In ten years it still hasn’t changed.
But then again, the minimum wage probably hasn’t either.
Bear swipes himself through the turnstile and hands me the card, but I’m distracted by the fact that you can now pay for subway fare with your phone. Despite the fact that the fare hasn’t increased in ten years, I can’t stop the wheel of time from turning. Technology eventually catches up to even the oldest of cities. I’m both thrilled and a little bit sad. I was never good at swiping at these turnstiles anyway.
The downtown A train arrives. The cars are the old 70s orange and brown carriages, with no automated voice telling you to “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.” Instead all you get is the muffled squawk of the train conductor yelling into the PA system. Next stop? That’s your best guess. Not that it matters much; most New Yorkers have the MTA map memorized anyway. 25 minutes later, Bear and I get off at Jay St.
The thing that strikes me when we emerge from the subway is the stink. Every big city in the world has a stink, a potent combination of garbage, rusted metal, asphalt, sewage, vomit, bile, and body odor, although the exact composition of the stink varies from place to place. In Seoul, it seems to be mostly garbage. In London, it’s vomit. Here, it’s the piss note that hits my nose first, followed by the relatively new scent of weed. I breathe it in deep. It’s rank, offensive, and oh-so-familiar. It’s home.
It’s a couple of blocks to the hotel from the station, so I start wheeling my 45lbs suitcase through the streets. Immediately I revert back to “block” as the unit of distance, even though blocks outside of Manhattan are somewhat meaningless. 80% of New York is walking. It is supremely annoying when you want to carry anything—groceries, shopping, suitcases—but wonderful for wandering. When I first moved to New York, I loved getting lost. It’s not that easy to get lost in Manhattan, but in the West Village, streets begin to tilt, twist, bend, and go sideways. There’s an intersection where West 4th meets West 4th, and when I was 18 I pretended it was the point where parallel universes overlapped.
I pause several times on the way to the hotel to take photos. Bear patiently waits for me, as he always does, and I am viscerally transported to when we were both 20 and living in London. Although we both attended college in New York, we met while studying abroad in London. I have always loved taking photos of strange and whimsical scenes, especially street photography, but the past decade or so hasn’t granted me much opportunity to find these things, and what few opportunities I had were further reduced by the pandemic. But now, as he did ten years ago, Bear waits for me to finish “working” a scene before moving on.
The thing about taking photographs is that I need two things: time, and aimlessness. In a places like New York, Seoul, and London, I had both those things because I walked everywhere. LA, where I grew up, isn’t so great for the aimlessness—one cannot wander aimlessly in a car—but at least there are plenty of whimsical things to see once you’ve driven yourself to a destination. What I dislike about where I live now is that while I have time, I no longer have aimlessness. No happy accidents. No serendipitous moments. Everything must be planned.
I hate it.
There are advantages to living where I am, of course. The low cost of living, for one. We can own a house here for a fraction of the price of a house in LA or New York. I have an enormous (if aesthetically dated) kitchen, an office, two guest bedrooms, an entire VR room in my finished basement, and a luxurious primary bathroom (or will have once we’re finished renovating). I love having all these things and yet. And yet.
I’m not alone in this thought. As Bear and I continue through the weekend, as we have dinner with old friends and roommates in Korea Way, as we wander through the streets of Dumbo on our way to the reception bar, we voice aloud our nostalgia. It’s nice taking the subway everywhere. It’s nice walking place to place. It’s nice having all sorts of ethnic food close by. We’re not necessarily in North Carolina by choice, although neither of us mind it all that much. We have friends there. Good friends. The best friends, even.
But New York is its own character, and always has been. You have a relationship with the city itself in much the same way you have a relationship with a person. You love them and you hate them, you delight in their idiosyncrasies and tolerate their flaws. I have never loved New York more than when I’m walking through a part of the city I’ve never been before, aimless and alone, taking photographs and sondering.
Sonder. According to the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, sonder is:
The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
Sonder is not a lexical gap; it’s a neologism. A made-up word. Whether or not it will ever become common use remains to be seen, but to me, it’s perfect. Sonder, my favorite feeling in the entire world. My love for New York is contained in that word, in the moments I pass by black and brown kids playing basketball on courts enclosed by chain link fences, when I say hello to enormous dogs dressed like butlers on a walk through Fort Greene park, when I see the reflected lights of Manhattan glistening in the East River as I walk beneath Manhattan Bridge. I love New York in a way I could never love North Carolina; I love New York the way someone loves their tempestuous but slightly toxic ex, the one for whom I gave up so much to stay together.
And I gave up so much. As much I love New York, it’s quite possibly the worst city in the world to live. In the evenings, Bear and I talk in quiet, wistful voices back at the hotel, wondering what it would be like to come back. We could, of course. As a full-time writer, I could work anywhere. As a highly specialized surgeon, he probably could as well. But what’s unsaid are all the things we would have to give up if we came back. Space. A husky dog. An in-unit washer and dryer.
The truth is, New York is a city for the young and the very rich. Bear and I were young here, but we’re not very rich. When you’re young, you can put up with so many things that I could not tolerate now. The pests, for one. Only one apartment I ever lived in didn’t have pests. I loved that apartment. It wasn’t the only reason I stayed there the longest, but it certainly was one of the most significant. That and the fact that my landlord never raised my rent.
The worst was the apartment in Chinatown. We had such a persistent roach problem in the kitchen that we never cooked. But the roaches weren’t the worst of it. No, the worst was coming home one day to a disgusting, sickly-sweet sort of smell, only to discover that the source of it was the badly decaying body of a rat that had somehow crawled into our oven and died there.
Ah, New York.
But like me, Bear feels the romance of the city. Or perhaps he feels the romance of our youth. We were young here together. It’s hard to escape the what-ifs surrounded by our nearest and dearest from college. It’s strange to see them all together again, because none of us seem to have aged much. Surely we would have aged by now? Or is it because none of have children and don’t intend to? It’s true that everyone I know with families have left the city by now—some to New Jersey, some to Connecticut, and some out of the tri-state area altogether.
There is a certain youthfulness to those who have remained. At the wedding, it manifests as a sort of…Brooklynishness. A white Brooklynishness. What we would have called “hipster” a decade ago. I’ve never realized how much white hipster New York wanted to be southern—and specifically the kind of white southern where I currently live—until now. Bear and I laugh at the craft beers and cocktails, the “rustic” combined with industrial aesthetic, but we laugh hardest at what we’re being served for dinner. Barbecue.
This was never our New York. Our New York was basement dive bars in the East Village, eating 3am breakfasts at diners in Astoria, smoking cigarettes on brownstone stoops on the Upper West Side, sticky stairwells and penny tile floors, dressing up like punk cabaret singers on Tuesdays, and folding pizza slices in half lengthwise before taking a bite. Maybe it is that I miss being young. That New York no longer exists for me. But as I sonder through the streets of Fort Greene, I smile to see that it still exists for others. The zoomers dressed in the exact same outfits I wore 15 years ago now and that I find myself wearing once again. The black, brown, and Asian aunties carrying knock off designer bags from Chinatown. The velour tracksuits and Cuban link chain necklaces that never went out of fashion north of 125th St. The Gen Xers going to work with brightly colored hair, tats, and gauge earrings. God I love this place. I love this place so much.
I don’t know whether or not we’ll come back. The last vestiges of our college group are already migrating away. When we next come back, it might be as tourists, not as prodigal children returning home. Maybe that’s when I’ll be able to let this first love of mine go for good. New York doesn’t belong to tourists; it never will. New York will never belong to someone who has never sacrificed to stay there, whose knowledge of its secrets are limited to the best hotels and restaurants to eat. New York will never belong to someone who has never sat on their fire escape talking to their upstairs neighbor about their love life for hours, only to never see them again. New York belongs to the ones who remain unfazed by subway rats crawling over their feet, to those who keep a collection of high heels beneath their work desk, and have more tote bags and cheap $5 umbrellas in their closet than clothes.
New York still belongs to me.
And I hope it always will.
credits
Wild Strawberry by Purrple Cat | https://purrplecat.com/
Music promoted on https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Journey’s End by Purrple Cat | https://purrplecat.com/
Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
BTS Serendipity (lofi version) and BTS Euphoria (lofi version) by smyang