So I have all of these half-written essays on my hard drive about leaving San Francisco. Most of them seem stilted or corny by now, having been written before I really knew if I was going to leave. I feverishly banged them out in that warped, heady time right before making a monumental decision, where inaction or self-destruction seem like the only logical alternatives. The truth is that I was lonely here, I missed my family, my friends. I missed writing, too–my job, which was lovely and cushy but didn’t really require too much brain power–didn’t give me many chances to write, and I was getting out of practice, and I was getting lazy, and I hated it.
When I go to New York now I stay in hotels with fancy soaps and tri-blend sheets instead of East Village studio apartments. I attend meetings in neighborhoods that I am so embarrassed to be in that I refuse to check-in on foursquare (!). I’ve been back three times since I moved and haven’t taken the subway once; cabs, expensed to my employer, whisk me between familiar divebars and unfamiliar midtown Hiltons.
To say my life has changed in the past nine months or six months or even three months would be an understatement; to say every molecule of my being has whirred in tornadic chaos is probably more apt. This week last year I was crumpled dejectedly on my mother’s couch, crying into my hair after a not-so-foolish April Fool’s Day breakup. Now I have built a life and bought a couch with someone who says things like, “When we get married…”
Each time I go back to New York I realize that it’s only me who’s changed; I’ve grown soft around the edges, that cutthroat ambition I used to brandish so fearlessly brushes off me like ash. When I see my friends they fling their arms around me with that New York bravado and ask if I miss Manhattan; the truth is that I do, but never as much as I thought I might.
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.”
The plane I traveled out West on was a genuine 21st century bird. A full mid-morning flight, we were packed in tightly, bodies beside bodies beside bodies, with only a few inches to spare. A guard stood at the gate alerting anyone with oversize luggage that it’d have to be checked at the last minute; with so much baggage, so much stuff, I wondered if the plane would be able to lift up into the air at all.
On the sterile ramp I stand and wait for the children in front of me to step onto the plane. The little girl, decked out in gold curls and jelly shoes, trails a mini Hello Kitty rolling suitcase behind her. Crouched at the plane’s door, I tap the metal body, rapping my knuckles three times against its skin. “Remember to make friends with the plane,” my Stepmother had told me the night before, sensing my pre-flight jitters. “I always do,” I responded with mock enthusiasm. In truth I never would have forgotten something so important; I’d already performed the flying rituals my OCD mandated three times that morning, bizarre concoctions of repeated phrases and tongue clicks and prayers sent up to a God that, in better times, I swear never even exists.
Friday night was my last in New York, so after some tearful goodbyes I took a cab over the Brooklyn Bridge by myself. I cranked Cat Power way up on my iPod and swiveled my neck to watch the Manhattan skyline fading behind me. Due to the humidity and the onset of spring, the air was sweeter than it usually is in the city. It was 1am and I was in a cab to Brooklyn to see a friend and it was my last night in New York and for a handful of minutes I felt 18 again. Feeling 18 is the same as feeling overwhelmed with possibility, as if there is light coming from your fingertips and sparks erupt with the lightest touch. On the bridge I watched the blinking lights fade and I sobbed uncontrollably. It just seemed like something I needed to do.
I can still clearly remember a time when I considered anything East of Astor Place very, very far away. Manhattan itself is such a tiny island, but it’s easy to let your personal universe here become even tinier. It’s odd, but that’s one of the things I absolutely adore about this city. Small as it is, Manhattan is still divided into very distinctive neighborhoods, and within those neighborhoods exist hundreds of communities that are constantly jostling against each other. I’ve lived in the East Village for the last two years, and so I’ve grown accustomed to this kind of melange living: within a handful of blocks you can move from a string of Ukrainian restaurants to a neighborhood with signs almost entirely in Spanish, passing hipsters and punks and colorfully dressed children along the way. The East Village isn’t even its own little world; it’s its own universe.
As with most neighborhoods, the East Village has its celebrities. Because it’s Manhattan there are the actual celebrities: Chloe Sevigny, for example, or Katie Holmes, who’s been living in the American Felt Building on 13th between 3rd and 4th avenues recently. But there are also the local celebrities that you start to recognize if you’ve been around long enough. Though he left the city a few months ago, let us not forget the Spiderman pedicab driver who used to draw so much attention on St. Mark’s. Another one of my other favorites is the lanky, scraggly-haired dude who walks around Tompkins screaming at the musicians and skateboarders. The other day I was reading there and a skater kid chased him out of the park with the deck raised above his head. The guy kept screaming about how, in the 70s, his skateboard was a piece of plywood with a roller-skate attached.
I think I was the only one who looked up from my book to watch. I’ve lived here for four years, but I guess that’s not long enough to have perfected effortless nonchalance the way practiced New Yorkers have.
On my way home from work this afternoon I was crossing 13th street at 2nd avenue and I looked up to see a woman with her hair tightly pulled back coming towards me from the opposite corner. As she approached, I realized she was crossing herself, forehead, heart, left shoulder, right shoulder, and then she kissed her fingertips and flicked them into the wind towards 1st avenue. I thought it was strange, and considered that she might have OCD, or that she was in a state of intense emotional turmoil and was praying en route to wherever that turmoil was forcing her. But then I looked at the spot where she’d sent that kiss, and there a half-block down was a parked Beth Israel ambulance with its lights flashing white and red.
I’m not a religious person and the last time I crossed myself I was 14 years old, but suddenly I was seized with the undeniable urge to hug her. I wanted to hug her because I knew that she was sending whatever she personally considered to be good faith in the direction of a stranger who was ailing. She didn’t know who was in the ambulance–if anyone even was in the ambulance–but that didn’t matter to her. The facts were irrelevant because sending that kind of goodness is never a bad thing, even if there is no one to receive it on the other end.
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Note: I wrote most of this on my Blackberry while walking home from work. Related note: what on earth is wrong with me?
I hate that jewelry companies have co-opted the word “timeless.” There are certain moments in my life that I’d like to call timeless, but I don’t mean “lasting forever” or “a sparkly way to tell her she means the world to you.” I mean that they have achieved exemption from the space-time continuum. These moments have allowed me to become unstuck. They’re not lasting (or fleeting, really) but they completely transcend the mathematical ways in which we measure experiences. They are moments, not minutes, if that makes sense.
I have been lucky enough to escape the bounds of time a handful of instances in my life. The instance I want to tell you about now happened last month. It was March, and though it was blustery in New York, it was springtime on the West Coast. I was driving across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco back to the East Bay, admiring the vast stretches of open space, the flat white roofs of buildings atop hills, the monstrous mechanical oil arms dipping into the sea. It was warm and we had the windows down, and I appreciated the weather in the way only an East Coaster can: back home that week it snowed, but out West my shoulders collected freckles from the sun.
“Colors and the Kids” by Cat Power was blasting from the speakers and that part came on where she belts, “I could stay here, become someone different/ I could stay here, become someone better.” It was then that the word “timeless” struck me, though I suppose I wouldn’t put it in those exact terms until later. There are other words that come to mind: defining, crystallized, revelatory. As Cat Power’s wail climaxed it hit me: I am going to move to San Francisco. I didn’t have a job yet and I didn’t have an apartment yet and every logical neuron in my body was screaming at me to stay in New York, but it was then that I just knew–something broke in me and I knew–that the next time I came back to San Francisco I wouldn’t leave again for a very long time.