My relationship with New York was both beautiful and heart-wrenchingly abusive.
No one was to blame. Everyone was to blame. The City was to blame.
I remember falling so deeply for the City. I was in my late-teens, clumsily asserting my independence by flying from a sleepy small town in Montana to the City That Never Sleeps. I placed myself squarely amongst the cockroach filled buildings of Brooklyn, oozing with a culture so different from my own.
In the early days of our relationship, New York could truly do no wrong. Enamored, I couldn’t see the grime for what it was — instead, I saw each stained subway tile and each pile of glossy black trashbags as art. The snarls and curses passed between quarreling pedestrians was poetry. The palpable stench of a subway car in the heat of summer was perfume. Walking home at 4 a.m. to my apartment in Bushwick as a single woman, weaving drunkenly down the street didn’t seem dangerous but exciting.
I didn’t wear rose-colored glasses, I wore what is more commonly known as a blindfold. But how could I help it? Whenever my pockets were empty, New York would lead me to find a roll of money on the ground (which, I later realized must’ve belonged to a drug dealer). If I were feeling lonely, it would send me subway buskers with gravity-defying stunts as the G train hurled its way to the next stop. And if I needed help, say, moving out of one apartment and into the next with a 2nd-floor walk-up, it would bring a chatty and overly helpful Black Car driver to me who would heroically wedge a dresser and boxes into his trunk, carry everything up the two flights of stairs, and offer to take me out to a salsa club later in the week (admittedly, it was not a wise idea to bring a stranger directly into one’s apartment).
New York was my everything.
—Until, it wasn’t.
I had once heard that when the City wants you to leave, it will force you out. I didn’t take that to heart, at the time, because my New York would never do something like that to me. I mean, we were too close, had been through too much for it to send me away.
I found out my boyfriend (the person, not the City) had been cheating on me — it was a clinic who clued me in on that news, if you catch my drift. A neighbor in my building had been stealing my mail, which was annoyingly inconvenient. After a seemingly benign confrontation, her daughter started assaulting me in the stairwell. A week or so later, I found out my apartment was infested with bed bugs.
After years of struggling financially, wearing down soles of shoes from sheer number of pavement pounded miles because it’s cheaper to walk than pay for a subway ticket, and being sent home with leftover food from my restaurant job because my boss was concerned I wasn’t eating enough — I was defeated. It was spring and rain was relentless, pouring down like a broken pipe. I fell to my knees in the middle of a walkway and sobbed. The abuse was too much. I had to move, immediately.
In the years since I hastily left New York and moved to the other coast, I would think back on my time with the City. My memory of the abuse faded little-by-little. The scars lightened and I could only seem to recall the good times. I’d get a pang in my heart whenever I would see an “I love NY” shirt, I’d shed a few tears upon hearing Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind.”
…These lights will make you feel brand new. Big lights will inspire you…