Bye Bye New York

Well, after said walks around the city, after sitting in some new cafes in Brooklyn, after a week visiting family in LA, I know it to be true: I must leave New York City. True: there are people who manage to carve out lovely lives for themselves here, and I'm not exactly sure why I'm not one of them. I just find myself thinking again and again: what is the rush for? I like to have conversations with strangers but the context I find myself having them in New York becomes strange and warped more often than not. Strangers either tend to cling to you after a few minutes of conversation, or I begin to cling to them, and one of us inevitably pulls away.

A few years ago I was sitting directly across from a guy on the 1 train. Neither of us had headphones in, we were just waiting for our stop. He kept smiling to himself, just a very sweet smile and his mind seemed his home, filled with fantasy and anticipation. The train was almost empty, which made the space and quiet for him to indulge this very simple, pure side, which normally, I imagine would have been concealed and protected from the noise and push of the masses. I can't see a smile like that crammed sardine-like into the 1 train around 9am on a Tuesday.

Across from him, I felt like a voyeur, but he was right there, in front of me, doing something you never see in public in Manhattan except maybe sometimes from children. I sat there batting around the idea of talking to him, but I also didn't want to take him away from wherever he was. So I hoped, by some miracle, that he would get off when I did. And he did. And by now intention of my own, we went up the same stair well and he looked in my direction. So I couldn't wait anymore, and I asked him, "What were you smiling about?"

"I was thinking about a trip I'm going on in a couple of months." It was February. "I'm going to ride my bike across the country."

"Wow," I said. "That sounds amazing."

"Yeah..." and then he went into some technical details I can't recall that we're boring, but were the kind of things you would say when you've been thinking about something a lot. "I'm really looking forward to it."

"I can imagine. That really sounds so great." He wasn't looking at me anymore now. Perhaps he realized he was sharing his dream with a stranger. Perhaps my responses were too dry. Or maybe he felt the desperate yearning that his plans were creating in me. Desperate yearning is something I think a lot of New Yorkers have in common, and he was looking forward to getting out of New York. He was going to fulfill that yearning and dreaming in his spare time about what it would be like. So why would he want to hang out with a chick who was caught up in the desperation. Besides, all I could bring myself to say to him after all that detail was, "It's awesome that you're doing that," as if he didn't already know.

He looked at me a little sideways. We were out of the turnstiles now and outside in the cold. We didn't stop walking when he said, "Well it was nice to meet you."

"You too," I said. And we kept walking in opposite directions. What I see now is that we were talking to each other through a glass wall. On my side was a strong commitment to making a life in New York, firm, committed, ever-reaching higher and higher. The guy on the train had let that go or perhaps had never had it. He was breaking loose, escaping the island, going to see what else was out there, if we really do have everything in New York. Actually, he already seemed to know that we don't. Now I know too. And I'm dreaming about what's next.