reflections on my first five years
only kind of a new york essay
While tracing a familiar path through Brooklyn on a beautiful, temperate, if slightly unseasonably chilly Sunday I realized that I have lived in New York City for five years. The anniversary passed in January without fanfare — I suppose it didn’t even occur to me until that moment, when I noticed how easily I mapped the streets, how I had developed an internal navigational system without even knowing it. I paused in front of a patch of roses poking through dirt. Long enough to forget how long it’s been, I thought, but really it’s only been half a decade, which seems like such a sliver of time in the grand scheme of things. But when you’re 27, that’s about a fifth of your life. It was an uncanny feeling, but also a feeling of deep gratitude, that being here is no longer exceptional or surprising, it just is. This is not a New York essay — though it’s about New York, duh. What I am really writing about is staying in one place, and how enormous that action, or non-action, can feel.
I’ve only lived in two apartments, each a thirty minute walk from the other, both near Prospect Park. I feel lucky to have moved so few times — I have friends who move every year, who bounce from sublet to sublet like it’s nothing, but I am naturally resistant to change. In September 2023, after a night of particularly bad behavior, New York experienced historic levels of rainfall, resulting in the infamous Gowanus Whirlpool, through which my friend climbed onto outdoor café tables to get to her job. I believed my actions from the previous evening had caused a biblical flood, and when I finally pulled myself out of bed I discovered a giant hole in our roof, right in front of our entryway. I was relieved to have a reason to call out of work that wasn’t, “I’m abjectly hungover,” and I canceled a first date by texting there’s a giant hole in my roof lmao. He wrote back, Lol… send a pic of the hole? It stayed that way all month, a particularly rainy month, of course, despite our numerous calls to 411. All this to say, we still resigned the lease.
I was even more clueless in my first year. When I look through my photos from that time I am always shocked and disgusted by the many, many instances of black mold growing on the walls of my poorly-ventilated, often leaky Crown Heights bedroom. A brick wall crumbled onto me while I slept, but it looked cozy in the pictures of the initial Facebook listing. I could probably blame any health problems I currently experience on the condition of that apartment, even though I loved it as much as I loved complaining about it, and paid only $850 to live right on Franklin Avenue and Sterling Place. While preparing for my upcoming September move I dug out some old notebooks, diaries I’ve kept consistently since 2016, when I was eighteen years old. My journals from that first year in New York City, 2020-2021, are predictably histrionic and lonely and unfocused, but it’s easy to chart a real pattern of growth. I was obsessed with tarot cards, and in one entry I mused about simply returning to my baptized faith of Catholicism, which I have since done. In another entry I ask myself if I should go to grad school, which I have also since done.
Though what I agonized over most consistently in those journals was my desire to be in a healthy relationship, something of which I believed myself incapable. Like many young women, I dated a lot, though I claimed I wasn’t actively “dating” (read: I met people in real life, and used dating apps only occasionally and experimentally). I narcissistically believe that I am a better person for all of that dating, because that fits my self-mythology. It still amazes me that anyone meets their partner through college, or even in their early 20s. I told myself in that lonely, searching time that to do that would be like cheating yourself out of experiencing more life, then proceeded to spend years thinking constantly about falling in love. Rereading journal entries from when I was 22 is almost comical; it will happen, I want to say, it will all happen. But it will be another four years and many false starts before it does.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve squandered it all. Against my better judgement I say that I am too old, too washed up at 27 to ever publish a ‘glittering debut’. Twenty-seven year olds publish novels all the time; if I had been 26, maybe it would have been something of note. I should have done it all by now, I should have written two books, three. And after all, I wrote the book, but it’s hardly edited. I spent too much time walking and meeting friends and going on bad and good dates to get anything of importance done. Do you want my advice? If you’re looking for a ‘productive’ life, never move here. Sure, you can waste time anywhere, but it feels particularly good and easy to waste time here. I’m being facetious obviously, but when I stare at the second draft of my novel and anticipate a publication date of two years from now or even never, I wonder if I should have been more monk-life and ascetic.
But monk-life asceticism seems near-sacrilegious to me now, having moved to the city right before one of the most alienating times in its history. I lived alone in a four bedroom apartment for months during the pandemic; it is the reason why I could never live alone again. The three girls who I had randomly moved in with all left New York, and I lied to my parents that one of them had stayed so they wouldn’t worry about me. To this day they are unaware of those strange, precipitous months. After everything, after five years, I think my mother would still be retroactively angry with me. I cannot believe I did that at 22 years old. I remember once breaking a bowl in the kitchen and stepping on one of the shards in my bare feet, laughing hysterically when I realized I didn’t have any bandaids, wrapping my foot in kitten-printed washi tape. And then I realized that both of my grandmothers had two children by 22, and I laughed even harder.
Now, summer in the city will always remind me of my first summer in the city. It jolts me back to July 2020, when open container laws were briefly dismantled, and everyone walked around dazedly with plastic cups of wine or a melted, watery Aperol Spritz from a neighborhood bar. The only place to be was outside. I would walk 40 minutes to pick up a prescription from CVS simply because I needed to pass other people on the way. I remember my first time taking a train since the beginning of lockdowns. It was totally empty but mercifully cold from the overzealous A/C, and I rolled a coin from one end of the car to the other. I went to the Strand in a mask and used my pandemic unemployment assistance money to buy a stack of books that I still have on my shelf to this day. Those government checks made me the richest I’ve been in my entire life, and I basically burned all of the money, but what else would I have done? I didn’t think there would be a tomorrow, and if there was, I certainly couldn’t imagine using the same currency.
This was the summer of fireworks, both literal and metaphorical, but mostly literal. In my neighborhood, you could hear and see and smell them from 9 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. at least every night. It drove me crazy, and I spent a lot of time on a local subreddit where neighbors insisted this was a government psy-op. We were all so beleaguered that we readily accepted that fireworks were some sort of Vietnam War-era emotional terrorism tactic rather than admit that the kids of the city were simply quite bored, as bored as we were. After two weeks of the nightly display, I bought a jar of foam earplugs, and that very night the noise stopped.
When I was attacked in 2022, many people responded with shock at my decision to stay in New York. I call it a ‘decision’ but it wasn’t — I never considered leaving. Bad things can and have happened to me everywhere, and I’d rather bad things happen to me here than good things happen to me anywhere else. Maybe it’s because I view New York itself as a ‘good thing’ that happened to me, and so I’ll never ask much more from it. I moved here for ostensibly the same reason that every starry-eyed humanities student moves here, but I don’t actually demand anything from it. I really do resent the way that certain young people move to New York and treat it like a playground before moving on to a ‘serious’ life in the suburbs of New Jersey or Connecticut, but I think this attitude transcends geography. As the new age meditation adage says, wherever you go, that’s where you are. I think it’s important to treat your home with care regardless of how long you live there. As for me, I cannot imagine ever living anywhere else. Even hypothetical thought experiments about moving to Paris ache like a cruel betrayal, a dagger in the heart.
It’s funny; when I had only lived in New York for a couple of years I felt wizened and ancient, like a side character in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. During my first semester of grad school it was a silly point of vanity for me that I had moved here before the pandemic unlike most of my cohort, as if I had any control over how lucky I was to get in right before shit hit the fan. I would drag them all to terrible, scene-y East Village bars, projecting an aura of knowingness that I am sure my older classmates could see right through. As if they wanted to be at KGB or The Grey Mare, as if I was the first 23 year old to tell them that Rocka Rolla, “sucks… but is also kind of good!” In your first year, you think you invented Union Pool. Now, with five years under my skirt, I feel like I just got off the bus with a valise and a newspaper, turning to a stranger to ask, “Say, where can an educated and clean young woman get a job in this town?” I imagine at ten years I will feel the same. There is nothing like an anniversary to make you realize how young you really are, how little you’ve really seen.
I’ve noticed a lot of people complain lately about the hyper-specificity of New York writing. The general tone seems to be, “We don’t care about the names of bars or streets that we don’t live by.” Fair enough. But I’d read an essay about Cleveland, Ohio or Gary, Indiana if the writer conveyed how much they loved it. Talk shit about that overrated restaurant that I will probably never go to. Tell me that your regional grocery store is better than mine. We are all right. Every writer wants to believe that they have something to add to the graveyard of reminiscences about their chosen environment. It’s like going to church; you hear the same words every time, and yet they are beautiful all the same. That’s what makes it a prayer. If you love where you live, anything you write about it will sound like bad poetry at worst and good poetry at best, but poetry nonetheless.
new york is better with you in it!