Goodbye To All That?

Again, Joan Didion.

Talking about being young in New York, and the reasons you leave once it has made you old, in language that is uncannily similar to several of my journal entries of the past year. She says:

“It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came here from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”

“…quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.”

“I suppose that a lot of us who have been young in New York have the same scenes on our home screens. I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with a slight headache about five o’ clock in the morning. I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home early in the morning light, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals…I liked the bleak branches of Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.”

“I remember one day when someone who did have the West Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank Bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.”

“All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut…There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid. I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings…because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede’s, and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat…I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and should see a ’specialist.’ He wrote down a psychiatrist’s name and address for me, but I did not go.”

“All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more.”

It feels ridiculous to quote so much. Of course, I could have, and perhaps should have, just referred you to the essay (the title is the title of this entry, fyi, sans question mark. She is more resolute than I about her goodbyes, or perhaps not, because I hear she has returned to her first love in her later years, a fact which inspires me somewhat). I can only say that as I read this today, I felt so strongly that this was something that I needed to say right now that it does not feel like quoting, but rather confiding– this is something I wanted you all to know about me.

This essay comes to me just as hopes for returning to New York for a week-long visit were dashed. The schedule doesn’t permit– there is a lot going on here Halloween week. I must remember that it is here that I now make my life, here where my most pressing obligations lie, and somehow, this decision handed down from above seems to embody a kind of finality– I suddenly feel that I will never go back, can never. And it hurts so much.

I gave Derya the essay to read, but she did not feel it the way I did. She took issue with Didion’s sentimentality. She remembers what New York looks like at five am, walking home from friend’s apartments, but is still so angry at what it took from her that she can’t bring herself to care anything for that scene. And I am also still angry with New York for spurning me, for denying me its love when that was all I ever wanted in the world. But I cannot help but keep loving. New York was my home, more so than Miami ever was, and I know this because it is infinitely more painful, and in some ways downright impossible, to face the question of return. I cannot explain how I feel about it except that when I allow the idea that I might not go back it is like I don’t have limbs, or vital organs, or a memory.

Before I left New York, I wrote my own “Goodbye To All That,” only I didn’t know that was what I was doing. I didn’t know then that I would leave, but I see now that, as Didion says, “the canker was already in the rose.” It is no gem of writing, but I include it because it means something different to me now then when I wrote it, and because even at my lowest– and I was so low– I never considered leaving, really.

“I don’t know when I stopped loving New York.

Perhaps it was when winter started coming later, or didn’t come at all. When it stayed warm into January and the landlords kept the heat on, made me pay for it anyways, so I had to open all the windows just to breathe. When the mosquitoes didn’t die, holding out sometimes into the new year, when they flew in through my open windows and left bites the size of dimes on my legs.

Perhaps it was when I moved uptown, to nowhere Manhattan, graying and forgotten, squeezed between Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, between those dirty, sleepy, homeless places, constantly flinging people back and forth to other nowheres in Long Island and New Jersey.

Perhaps it was my first nine to five— when I began commuting during rush hour. When I broke my foot falling down the subway stairs and rode the train on crutches for two months. When not a single person gave up their seat while I stumbled all over the loaded train. They looked up at me coolly, unapologetically. When I realized they were all dead tired. When I realized they were all dead. When I realized I was one of them.

I had lived for New York, had loved it more than I ever had any man. I had found forgiveness and friendship in its landmarks when I had none. And I always found cause to forgive it, though it never asked.

I watched it die. It was too expensive, the bars filled up too early on a Thursday night with clean white kids from suburban colleges. But I loved it still. I argued with my friends, “if it isn’t New York, where is it?” I said emphatically. One by one they drift West. And it is New York that is taking them from me. It sends them spinning in arbitrarily separate directions, with the same fated indifference in which it threw us together.

I had tried to live elsewhere once. It was rural. There was a mountain outside my window, with goats grazing at its base. I had gone there to paint. I hated it there. I didn’t paint a thing.

It was the density of New York that I needed, the ability to see all things at once, to see how they interact, how they connect. New York was everything in that way, the concept of everything— all elements present simultaneously, all things moving in all directions, but with a singleness of purpose and nature that forced you to confront the perfection of the universe. Beneath that mountain, the connections fell apart. I couldn’t see the lines—point B was simply out of sight from point A—and the universe was senseless and ugly.

When New York became the same as that mountain town. When nothing made sense anymore, and everything was chaos. When the lines decomposed like dead worms, dropped to the ground, and curled in mushy little messes. And I had to admit that maybe I had just been too happy for my own good, and that all of it had been some kind of mirage. The only thing that was real was Work and the rush hour train, and Penn Station and the Port Authority, and all of those things were a waste of time.

But it had been real, the happiness! I had caught myself in those moments and held still, careful not to burst them. So precarious they were, like a wonderful dream in which you are afraid to admit your lucidity for fear you’ll wake up. But real, I swear it. The first warm day after winter— tank tops and shorts, Cliff and I wandering, always ending up in the park to watch the beautiful girls flaunt their newfound skin. We played Scrabble a lot. He made up words. We went to shows at the Bowery, walked right in because we knew the doormen and felt a part of something, passed the time watching friends play garage band, and knowing all the lyrics to their silly songs. I lived on 10th street then, with a toilet that was always running and a mouse problem, where there were always people in and out: Chris playing ‘Spanish Harlem Incident’ on guitar and Cliff studying linguistics, sounding out the words as if he never learned to read…’Pi-noe-kee-o…eeeeeee-o…eeeeee-ooo,’ and me laughing that I should be allowed happiness. I never expected it, really. There were times when I never thought it possible.

I remember crying on my stoop on a cool fall night over a suddenly dead friend, and feeling so alive, so alive, so alive, watching the people on the street riding bikes and holding hands and making noise and knowing we were all alive together.

Now, somehow, we are all dead together. The only people I see are on the trains.

It is a hard place to stay happy, I suppose. New York can turn on you. Part of it being everything is that it can work with anything. It can become what you are. If you are dead, New York will die with you—it will grow cold and stiff and grey. It will never speak to you. It will treat you like a ghost.

Perhaps it was when it stopped being new, when everything stopped being new—sex and the seasons among them. It is not New York’s fault really…”

And it goes from there…