I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

I wrote this for an essay class last semester, but didn’t get around to posting it until now. The assignment was to reflect on a strong reaction you’ve had to another author’s writing. Sorry if it’s a little tl;dr.

“Good-bye to All That” by Joan Didion, the mandatory “this city has ruined me” essay that all New York writers inevitably produce, is a piece I’d composed in my head many times before realizing she had already penned it.

Written in 1967, the sentiments woven into this essay still resonate more than 40 years later, though maybe that’s because, as she writes, “One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” Upon reading “Good-bye to All That” for the first time, I realized that many of my own essays had a similar spine, albeit with a contemporary twist: they were peppered with misanthropic indictments of the internet and the personal challenges I’d faced in coming to grips with the city, but somehow I always eventually stumbled upon the same point that Didion makes: to be young and disaffected in New York is perhaps the most unoriginal stance a writer can take, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, it’s also one of the most resonant.

It’s impossible for a writer to exist in New York and not have their location factor notably into their writing. The very act of living in New York becomes an aspect of your personality in a way living in another city doesn’t; “New Yorker” may be a loaded term, but who can even list the traits of a “Philadelphian?” Writers in New York typically fall very explicitly to one side of the gradient: whether they’re blindly glorifying the city or seeking to destroy its mythical aura, they are inextricably, eternally linked with it.

I moved to New York when I was 18 and I was disillusioned by it by my 20th birthday. I’d walked home in wrinkled clothes at dawn, when the streets were eerily quiet, and I’d gotten sick in the back of a taxi and I’d lamented how easy it was to quickly become an old person in a city brimming with young people. I’d written the same story as Didion, where I prematurely wondered, “Who is the schoolgirl who used to be me?” and stared longingly into warm, expensive apartment buildings. But in my own version of the story, I let New York destroy me. It was all very intentional: I didn’t put up a fight. I had come to New York because life was cluttered and complex and it made sense to live in a place where everyone accepted that. In my version of the story, I lived out my days in the brassy chaos: no final California atonement, no broad-shouldered husband, just the messiness of New York, the stench of the East River in mid-July, the feeling that a life lived elsewhere, outside of New York, was maybe not even a life at all.

I’d composed this story and read Didion’s piece just before moving to Paris for five months. Having grown weary of the chaos of New York, I ached for a reprieve. Gothic and dripping with romance, Paris was the darkest city of light I had ever seen: there, the cold snaked beneath my clothes, and men with grim eyes touched my hair on the Metro. Wheat-haired girls with elegantly arched spines and broken blood vessels spindling across their cheekbones eagerly paged through thick novels. Alone in a foreign place, I was constantly seized with the irrational desire to hug every stranger I came into contact with, until once late at night, a man sat across from me on a crowded train, squeezing his naked dick with a maniacal look contorting his face. After that, I missed New York with a visceral intensity. My less than robust grasp of the French language crippled my ability to communicate in any meaningful way; as a writer, it tortured me to be so permanently tongue-tied. In bed in the dark Montmartre apartment of the man I was seeing, I would reminisce about the glories of New York, the 24-hour delis that litter every block, the fat pigeons with metallic, pearly down, how even if I hated the city at least I spoke the language. As Didion writes, “I did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.” If absence makes the heart grow fonder, my heart was sick with fondness. Still struck with the naivety of a suburban transplant, I too romanticized every aspect of New York: even the rats that scampered between trash cans in the late night summer stink seemed a testament to the artistic grittiness I  admired. My time away from the city nurtured this New York awe, and the idealization that Didion speaks of grew more and more resonant in my homesick mind.

*

I landed at JFK a few days before Christmas, my first time back in the US in over four months. I sat on the floor of the baggage claim and lovingly opened my cell phone. I was elated to be reunited with a gadget that meant so much to me in the States, but was an inoperable mass of plastic and buttons on the other side of the Atlantic. I refrained from crying until I got into the car—my father’s jeep, which seemed gigantic compared to the tiny European cars I’d grown accustomed to—and the recognizable license plates of other cars began to come into view. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania: familiarity consumed me. Over winter break I reread Didion’s essay, a piece I’d kept affectionately crumpled in my desk drawer in my tiny Paris apartment.

“Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach,” she wrote.
“Yes!” I thought, “This will be the beginning; I can make this city new again.”
“Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about.”

I maintained these idyllic visions of New York while abroad, but when I returned to the city I began to realize that nothing at all had changed. I’d come back in the dead of winter, a time when I often found myself growing irrationally angry at the massive buildings that funneled harsh wind down the avenues and up under my jacket. I was happy to be reunited with my friends, but they were still having the same conversations, making the same jokes, nonchalantly tapping cigarette ash off of fire escapes. The nights bled together colorlessly and were rarely punctuated by the adventurous spirit I’d missed so deeply while in Paris. I fell in love with someone, and began to have dreams that I was driving carelessly across the Golden Gate Bridge: in essence, I began to dream about leaving New York.

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends,” Didion writes. “I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.” When did my own affection for New York begin to sour? The winter I returned from Paris, there were moments that could signify the end: the night in March when the man I’d been seeing showed up at my apartment with shameless bite marks on his neck, and when I refused to kiss him he angrily pushed me up against the wall; the disappointment on my 21st birthday when my best friend didn’t call; the cerebral, overmedicated ache I couldn’t shake. Like Didion, I can’t pinpoint the exact day that I decided I wouldn’t—no, I couldn’t—live in the mess anymore, that a life lived elsewhere, outside of New York’s heavy machinery, could be a life, and maybe even a better one. But one day I woke up and all of the pigeons were ugly instead of charmingly ornamental; waddling grotesquely, they were no longer a necessary component to the thriving city life I’d come to define myself by.

There was no broad-shouldered husband, but there was the almost cosmic gleam of California, a glare so bright even Didion herself couldn’t ignore it. “We took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles,” she writes, “and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York.” I launched the idea of moving West upon my father when we were in the company of family friends, so that his burdensome politeness would straitjacket his ability to react with any ounce of disapproval. His coy attempts to keep me within a 300-mile radius of my Pennsylvania hometown eventually waned, particularly when I explained the frustrations I’d been having with New York. I started to research apartments and job opportunities in San Francisco. My friends and family were baffled: no one understood how I could leave a place I had tried so hard to become synonymous with. The best I could offer them was this: “The life I’ve built for myself in New York doesn’t fit anymore.”

At the very beginning of her essay, Didion muses, “New York is for the very old or very young.” If this is the case—and I think it might be—I grew old very quickly for someone so young. And in the same way colors seem brighter when you’re a child, so did New York for me: I can still conjure the love-struck way I wandered through the grid at 18, 19. But it took shorter than I expected for me to lose that wonder, the constant hum that pulsed beneath every right angle I turned: “I am in Manhattan!” I’m unsure what exactly inside me broke, making me finally ready to leave behind a place I once thought I’d live and die in. But like Didion says: it’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

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