The weather had changed by the time I got to New York last weekend. Variations of “too damn hot” had stopped trending on Twitter, no one was standing haughtily with their hands on their hips before the air conditioner, wrists fluttering in front of their reddened cheeks like a makeshift fan. “You came at the right time!” everyone said. “It has been so hot.”
I was scared that going back to New York would strike close to a reality I’ve tried hard to fend off: I miss New York terribly, sometimes. Its conveniences, its inconveniences; its arrogance and its rottenness. I thought going back might trigger something in me. Perhaps the desire to give up everything I’ve built in San Francisco the past few months would swell so strongly I’d finally be willing to admit defeat. It would be so easy to give in, get out, move back. Settle in with the same people, nab an easy 9-5 editorial job, reacquaint myself with delivery.com.
But it didn’t happen that way. I still felt crushed by the buildings, I felt myself growing unnecessarily angry at faceless pedestrians with that high fashion swagger. My nostalgia for New York did not outweigh my distaste for it. Climbing into the cab at dawn on my way to JFK I thought, “So this is relief.”
I think that there are two ways to write about New York: you can write from inside the city itself, in Brooklyn coffee shops or on scorching metal fire escapes. This inevitably affects your prose, the way you describe your surroundings immediately imbued with a kind of self-referential condescension and loathing. Daily observations birth whole paragraphs: the rat you saw eating from the dumpster behind Veselka is suddenly a lead metaphor. It’s close to impossible to accurately describe emotion about a place when you’re writing from the middle of that place.
The other way to write about New York is to write about it from somewhere else. Nostalgia and yearning are notoriously fruitful mindsets from which to write. The danger in this is that you’re forced to rely on your memory, and the mind is so sinewy and malleable that sentimentalism can override anything you actually want to say.
I think Jonathan Lethem, he of the Brooklyn white dude writers cabal, nailed it when he said, ”I take a lot of pleasure in New York, but I’m always kind of here in my mind. In a way, I need to be dreaming my way back here. The longing and exile are part of my relationship to writing about this place.”
Longing is part of being a New Yorker, of being a writer. Or perhaps, longing is simply part of being a human.
I am a writer, a New York exile, a person permanently full of yearning. A few weeks ago I bought a map of Manhattan from the art store, and with stickers I marked all of the places that meant something to me. My apartments in the East and West Villages, my workplaces in Murray Hill and TriBeca; intersections where words caused my knees to heave and lock, restaurants where intimate fights raged so intensely they shook the glassware.
The truth I guess is that I love New York, and that is exactly why I moved to San Francisco.