Well, I should put “New Yorker” in quotes.
I am no native of the city, nor have I spent the majority of my life amongst its gardens and sculptures of concrete and glass. But after nearly a decade living in Manhattan, one does invariably change. You collect bits of the city the longer you’re anchored there—every day a trinket, the size of a grain of sand, added to my pocket. Hoping one day I could build a sandcastle in the middle of Greenwich Village from the collected ephemera of my consciousness. The sights, sounds, and ideas all become part of you, meshing with the person your body once inhabited. Regrettably, said ephemera doesn’t pay the rent.
Existing inside New York City is like entering a time warp. It’s a bubble where the entire world feels enveloped within—you feel nowhere and everywhere all at once. Eight years: simultaneously a lifetime and a mere week. You first move there with the clearest of intentions and a Romantic (capital R) perspective of its possibilities and social order. You leave still with that promise, only hoping this time to find it somewhere outside the city walls.
Because it’s true: To those who have experienced life in New York, that’s how your chapters will be inevitably divided. It’s always before New York and after. My days there will eventually constitute a blip in my existence, and undoubtedly I in it…that, a fact I have come to accept. Without coming off too saccharine, it’s easy to say the city has fused itself onto my soul, and no surgery yet exists to reverse it, thank god.
Translating my life into one of the many biographies on my bookshelf, I’d earmark most pages in my New York chapter. It was in New York where my career began, but also where I fell out of hope with the traditional corporate métier. It’s the place where I got engaged, where I got married, where I was destined to exist at the same time and place as a homeless puppy from Kentucky (that is, an adoption van outside the Union Square Petco in the wet heat of August 2018).
It’s where I kindled some of my most treasured friendships—and where I encountered transient personalities who have, unbeknownst to them, become characters in my mythical biography—two ships passing in the night, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would say. Sometimes, the mark that a person imprints on you isn’t noticed until the chapter is complete. An invisible tattoo they’ll never know they etched.
"I guess when you're young, you believe there will be many people with whom you'll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times."
—Before Sunset (2004)
Fortunately and unfortunately—and this I have verified—the city doesn’t stop breathing once you leave. Your former bodega will soon forget your name and face, and the rich will continue to enjoy being rich.
In the end my dreams did survive, but not without evolution. They exist in the Hudson River I now gaze upon outside my window, in the birds chirping in the trees, on the historical land I now spend my days. Leaving the time warp of the city has gifted me with a moment to pause, to reflect, to plan what’s next.
I will forever be beholden to a place that, perhaps ironically, was the cause of my many debts. But now a sandcastle of my own creation is building inside of me at last, its foundation being transplanted along the banks of the Hudson, where many actual Romantic artists had also once built upon their dreams.