New York City occupies my mind more than it should. You might say my obsession borders on the unhinged. No other city has brought me the comfort I found there. This fixation dictates each meaningful choice I make.
I moved to New York in the early months of 2017. My funds were sufficient for a graduate student but paltry next to the six-figure salaries of friends in cushy West Coast technology jobs. Securing lodging in New York, it seems, requires references, an immaculate credit history, or a wealthy benefactor willing to vouch for you should you lack means.
My initial New York apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up in Harlem that would tax even the sturdiest of cardiovascular constitutions. That first week, wrestling still with jet lag, I would rise in the small hours and venture out for a morning stroll. Occasionally a sidewalk dog would greet me, or the Syrian bodega owner blasting Asalah at full volume. It was strange. An overpowering melancholy arose from finding myself in the world's largest city, far from home. Yet I also felt a newfound sense of inhabiting a self-contained universe.
An unreasonable portion of my hours were devoted to surveying every café proximate to Columbia. I sought places where I could perch with my laptop and feign productivity. In truth, I would gaze at the tide of other well-appointed graduate students, their splendid winter coats contrary to my unsightly Uniqlo jacket. Like all who came of age revering Nora Ephron films, I had dreamed of autumn in New York. And when at last it descended, I exhausted the gallery of my cheap Android phone capturing each tree on West End Avenue brandishing orange, crimson, or umber leaves.
Some months on, I found myself in a consensual arrangement with S, who occupied a vast apartment in the East Village. There was a liberty in it. The flat stood at the intersection of Avenue A and 1st Street, a block from Katz's where tourists would queue for the famed pastrami. New Yorkers appear eternally unmoved by sightings of luminaries in the streets. On Thursdays I would venture to Tompkins Square Bagels in the hope of spotting Timothée Chalamet ordering a bacon, egg, and cheese on a bagel. On Fridays S would escort a lowly doctoral student to their preferred schmear spot in the Lower East Side, Ludlow House. There, size zero models on Adderall would post $18 cocktails to their Instagram stories.
A year on, having assimilated the syntax of my doomed liaison with S, and a short 9 month stint in Los Angeles amidst a raging pandemic I relocated to the 106th Street and Columbus Avenue. Adjacent to my building was Dive 106, where I weathered sexual tensions across several first dates over Ranch Chicken Tenders. That spring, I befriended A, who occupied the Upper East Side— a neighborhood I had barely explored. A revealed the enchanted path through Central Park transporting me to Weill Cornell Housing on the East Side. I could never persuade A to join me boating in the park, but we would occasionally pause before the blossoms and marvel at the city's beauty, especially in spring. A shared my mania for the city, understandably after four years studying physics in the college town of Ithaca. For once I inhabited an agreeable apartment, now with a fire escape serving as terrace and a neon red light elevating the atmosphere to that of a discotheque as Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black" played on endless repeat. Naturally, I fell for A, this time in denial. Physically, A insisted I was not his type. I loathed my body all the more. For years my sister had conditioned me to believe skinniness nearly obligatory. I had starved myself to descend from XL to M at Zara, and here was a person with whom I wished to construct a life finding me lanky.
The autumn that my father died of COVID, he had inundated my inbox with cautionary tales of protecting myself from this unholy scourge that had seized the world, New York City in particular. And yet there he lay, battlling for breath in the intensive care unit. That week in hospital, my father did not call or text. But it comforts me to know he called my mother. For years I had contemplated their bond—strikingly dissimilar personalities, zero compatibility. Was it love that made him call? Or loneliness? I never found an answer. Instead, I wept each time a friend or colleague commiserated, at times by the Low Library at Columbia, at times on a bench in Central Park West. I thought I would die, too, of grief, but I did not. I passed the autumn's last months in India, then returned to my studies at Columbia. Last week, on Father's Day, a friend wrote that she missed the notion of a supervisory adult whose presence allowed her a casualness in her own adulthood. I can nearly relate to it now.
The abrupt cadences, the sidelong glances at emotional truths, the way meaning accrues gradually through what's left unsaid.