New York Still Hasn't Broken My Heart

On August 21, the city and I hit our five-year anniversary. I know we're really married because I sort of let the milestone pass me by. Don't think the honeymoon phase is done: I am still fervent, crazy, hopeless, head-over-heels in love with New York. I adore it, I do, but I didn't get around to writing a sentimental Facebook post on August 21 because I was getting ready to leave.

I'm writing about (to?) New York from Knoxville, where I'm finishing my first full week at my first-ever writer's residency. I'm sitting at a wooden table in soft lighting in a farmhouse kitchen, where I have been getting the majority of my writing done this week. The porch swing and the living room recliner are for reading. The desk in my bedroom is for emails. The chicken coop and the sheep pen are for staring into the eyes of animals who do not care if I live or die, as long as I have a rich array of grains in a bucket. There is no Dunkin' Donuts down the block, so when I go on a walk, I return with nothing. With three residents in the house, we've been making two pots of coffee each day, and supplementing with a gallon of cold brew I made. I also made a crustless fudge pie. I made bread. One night, I sat up in the dark, blearily trying to figure out where I'd tucked my white noise machine, only to remember the soft-churning cricket sounds were...actual crickets.

Oh man, you guys, it is so not New York! It's definitely not the middle of nowhere, either. This area of Knoxville reminds me a bit of where I grew up in Missouri, when I was very young, before we had a Target and a Barnes and Noble and a Taco Bell closer to my house than the high school. Here, in Tennessee, we're tucked away in a little holler. Mornings last forever, with heavy mist that only burns off when the sun is high and strong enough to break through the thick of the trees. But it is not New York, which is the unfortunate description I have to assign most places in the world.

To prepare for this blog post, or the original iteration I'd planned to write, I revisited Joan Didion's Goodbye to All That a couple times. I don't think I'd read it since I moved to New York. Before I visited the city, I didn't have any passionate fantasies about it. It wasn't even on my list of places I'd consider living – after college, I figured, I would install myself on the west coast and stay there for good. When I was 21, one of my friends in Los Angeles, who loved Joan Didion and went to school in New York, told me it was pretty much like the stories said. Didion makes a point in GtAT that dozens of people, in the city and outside it, have reiterated to me in one way or another since I came here: "New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.”

When Didion moved to New York, she was 20, and planned to stay six months, and she could see the Triborough Bridge from her window. When I first moved to New York, at 22, I could see the Triborough from my window, too, but by then, it had been renamed, as the RFK. 

Didion stayed for more than six months. She was there for eight years. In two weeks, I'll be 28, the age she was when she moved back to California. I'm old enough to know that's still very young, even if Joan Didion felt otherwise.

Before my trip to Knoxville, I re-read Didion's essay over and over, thinking about it as I assembled travel outfits and chose which books to pack. The more I thought about it, the less certain I was that I knew what she was saying. Why, exactly, did New York City lose its charm for Didion? What aspects of the city were pulled out from under her – the fun of parties or the thrill of her career? She openly admits that she "did not lose that sense of wonder about New York," but also learned "it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair." And then, Didion details her "very bad" twenty-eighth year, which just sounds like...depression. Something I've had in many places, including, yes, New York, and which has never eroded my love for the city. 

It could very well be a disparity in dispositions. Didion writes that in her first three days in New York, she had a bad cold and a high fever, and though the air conditioning in her hotel room was freezing, she never called the front desk to change the temperature because she was scared of tipping incorrectly.

Not to brag, but on my third day in New York, I collapsed in a Whole Foods when a cyst on my ovary burst. After some nice tourists lifted me off the floor, I took an Uber to a hospital, where doctors examined me until 2 am. I didn't know anyone in the city, so I sat in my hospital bed alone and cried and laughed and rolled my eyes. They figured out what was wrong and let me go. Then I took another Uber back to my Air BnB and slept for 12 hours. I love Joan Didion, but I think she would've headed back to California the moment she fainted in the freezing Whole Foods sushi section.

Anyway. As I packed for Knoxville, I tried to think of a good way to approach this post that wasn't just Joan Didion was a big wimp. Maybe the reason GtAT bugs me so much is that it glamorizes and feminizes a spectrum of cynicism I've never been able to access. When the Leaving New York Essay Industrial Complex sparked back up during the pandemic, I read accounts of ex-New Yorkers finally leaving the city and just felt stupid. What had changed for these people, that hadn't changed for me? Did I actually never have access to the Real New York that they said was dead now? What were they missing? What was I missing?

A lot of people who love New York know that it presents an easy shorthand for all the other stuff you ever feel. So, my big New York complex isn't really about New York. It's about me. More specifically, it's about a fundamental aspect of my personality that others have challenged for years. I've always been an optimist. And I've always been warned that this will not last forever, that someday my hopeful view of the world will be wrenched from me and never given back. My whole life, it has been this way. A lack of bitterness, a lack of cynicism, has translated, somehow, to a lack of intelligence or awareness. During my first year in New York, it was common for people who found out I was a new arrival to ask, "so do you hate it yet?" Why was everyone waiting for me to get my heart broken?

I reject the premise that I love New York because I am stupid. Did you play mermaids or witches or fairies as a kid? Did you watch Sailor Moon or Pokemon? Okay. So, you know that magical creatures derive their powers from different sources. And I think that, if you live better and love more in New York, you derive your power from it, from next-door heartbeats and trash and traffic and strangers who help you and/or insult you and/or propose marriage. Did you ever have a friendly encounter at the grocery store with a nameless person you still think about? Do you say you’re going to the party for an hour, and stay out and up and talking until four, long after you stopped drinking? Have you ever given half your sandwich or pair of earrings or cigarette to someone who looked interested? If so, New York might feed the thing inside you. Move here.

“Here,” I say, from Knoxville. Even when I’m not in New York, I am there, in some basic way. Basic, like fundamental. Like a part of me was there before my body ever was. I can count on one hand the friendships I’ve had that clicked instantly – the first time we had a real conversation, I felt everything slide into place, an organic, immediate connection – and New York is one of them. Are you really going to deny those relationships, be they with a person or a place, as anything less than soulmates?

 I’m not stupid, I just believe in magic (galaxy brain expansion meme here).

And maybe you don’t. That’s okay, though I will privately hope that something changes in your life, and you believe. Even if it’s not New York. I don’t know how Joan Didion felt about New York after she moved back in the late 1980s; most of her later work that I’ve read is about California, or a version of New York shaded by grief. But I know she loved California, the central valley where she grew up, and I am certain she derived her powers from that place. When I lived in Los Angeles, I was restless, and often unhappy. I liked and loved the city, and California, but it didn’t feed me, the way New York does. I know my limitations well enough to stop explaining there.

On August 21, 2020, I posted some snapshots on social media to celebrate my three-year anniversary with the city. “To be happy here for a long time, I think you have to be willing to suspend your disbelief,” I wrote in the caption. “To place yourself in the hands of unsympathetic magic, to commit yourself to progress though it’s a small and unconvincing bounty.” So, this is not a new feeling, for me.

When Didion wrote about leaving New York, she didn’t talk about magic. She listed all the restaurants she didn’t want to go to anymore, and all the stores that had closed down or changed too much. A number of mid-pandemic essays about leaving the city echoed that. This is a shallow aside, but: if your definition of “New York” is the businesses you hope stay open for your whole lifetime, I’m sorry, but I don’t know how you expect to find happiness anywhere. Maybe that’s one place where I hold the opposite of naivety. I know better than to hang my joy on the hope that things stay the same. Everything is going to change, always, forever, and stop being exactly what you wanted.

So…you learn to love the changes. You remember what you signed up for. And sometimes, you go to Knoxville for two weeks. I’m not tired of the city, but I’ve found that, for my writing practice, it is healthy to go somewhere new, and sort through all the thoughts I’ve been hoarding. Living in a dense city is good for my sticky brain. I get these sort of psychic scraps of everyone else’s thoughts, little tidbits of everybody’s energy that implant in my mind and eventually become strange, silly ideas. And at this big farmhouse table, I can spread them out for inspection.

It’s so quiet. It’s clean, in the people-way, but dirty, in the dirt-way. The only crowds are animals and insects. When I go for a mile-long walk, I don’t see another person, which makes me sad. Every time I hear a noise outside the window, it feels personal. My fellow residents, my new friends, share their jam since I made us bread. After the treeline is more treeline and more treeline and more treeline. My Metrocard takes a temp job as a bookmark. I get dressed in clothes my friends gave me before I left, cast-offs I layer on as the days and nights grow colder. And there are no bridges anywhere. I love it, but I could never live here, I say from the porch swing, sitting under a blanket of endless stars, almost as beautiful as city lights.