New York, I love you, but you’re bringing me down.
These were the LCD Soundsystem lyrics I spent my last weeks before college replaying over and over again until they hurt to hear. I guess I have always been one for cinematic exits. I mean, you can’t transition from New York to Gambier without somehow placing yourself in the coming of age movie narrative, imagining reinventing yourself in the quiet hum of rural ohio, somewhere between the cornfields and nearly miraculous foliage.
And most of all, the five gruesome months spent watching the streets empty out like water into a drain made me feel bitter about every piece of the city that I always said I’d never leave. I was sick of it. I was sick of the shrieks from the bar across my apartment every night, I was sick of the filth, of the near-death experiences everytime I crossed the street, of the painfully chaotic attempt at efficiency that was the MTA, and of feeling stifled by being stuck in the only place I’d ever known.
I think at some point in everyone’s life they start to resent the places that raised them. Sure, they hold all our sweet memories, but they hold all our bad one’s too. Packing up and leaving every bit of baggage you’ve accumulated looks so sweet in the movies, doesn’t it?
But now I am over 500 miles away and all I can think of is how much I miss New York. Maybe it’s the distance, or my hatred of change, or the fact that I’ve never spent a fall without hot cider from the café down my block, but I am filled with nothing but love for the place that two months ago I swore I was done with.
There are some economists and academics and analysts recently who have argued that New York City is dying, and this time it isn’t coming back. They see a city that got hit hardest by the coronavirus, boarded itself up for months on end, only to wake up to crushed businesses and dwindled spirits.
But the thing they don’t realize about New York is that it has a pulse. I am three states away and I can still feel it. When people say it’s the city that never sleeps they don’t just mean the ambitious suit-wearers. They mean the chess-players in Union Square, the musicians of the subway lines, the people that wake up every day just to be nothing like everyone else. Because that’s what New York is. It’s eight million people in eight million different colors so absorbed in their own world and yet all of it makes a single harmony.
So, this is my love letter to New York City. This is a love letter to everytime the trains broke down and made me late to school. This is a love letter to all those rats that watched me have mental breakdowns on park benches during the college process. This is a love letter to Mr. Softee and the Strand and the East Village thrift shops and the view of the skyline from Brooklyn Heights and the serenity of my grandma’s house in Astoria. This is a love letter to the musicians and the sugar at the bottom of a street-cart iced coffee and that perfect slice of 99 cent pizza after school. This is a love letter to the all-too intimidating skateboarders of Tompkins Square Park, to the mom-and-pop bookstores, to the vibrant singing of a stranger on my morning commute. This is a love letter to the fact that I know my experience growing up in New York is not a one-size-fits-all, that every neighborhood has its own energy, its own history, its own love.
I spent too much time thinking I had stained where I grew up with bad memories and that I couldn’t move forward unless I physically did. There are parts of where we come from that we can never take out of ourselves no matter how hard we try. There are things we did and said and thought, there are people we once were, that live with us forever. Somehow we are walking testaments to our own history.
So, no, New York City is not dying, not to me nor to anyone else who has actually seen it for what it is. Anyone who says that is blind to the gold-plated names on Ellis Island, or the rock and roll legends that once roamed Greenwich Village, or the streets worn with protest signs and blood and sweat and tears. New York City does not die. It can’t. We wouldn’t let it. And even if I leave it forever, I think I’ll take that with me wherever I go.
