Back in New York
Hello there. I haven’t written in a while. For a good part of June and July I was swept up in a dream of sunny California—think vineyards, think peaches, think surfing and tacos and long bike rides—and I barely had time or inclination to answer emails, much less tap out a missive. I was going and going, every morning and night. I was lousy at staying in touch. (Friends, good lovely friends: yikes! So sorry.) I was exhilarated, and I was exhausted, and I got tan. I picked mulberries and fed a chicken from my palm, and then I came home.
Ah, home.
Home to Brooklyn, home to Ditmas, home to that boxy brick one-bedroom that I fled back in early June of last year. Where I have not slept in fifteen months.
On the Q train out, the old recitation of stops felt like a spell. Transfixed, I watched the blackness outside the car as if some great and uncertain drama were playing out. Nearby, others flicked their phones.
Walking up to my apartment, I felt my heart flopping like a fish. There, by the steps, stood a neighbor I hadn’t seen in eighteen months, and I half-expected him to say, “Get out of here! You don’t live here anymore!” but instead he greeted me, beaming. “Kyle!” he cried. “I haven’t seen you in—what? a year? It’s so good to see you again.” My heart calmed. My face relaxed. “It is so, so good to see you,” I told him, and felt surprised by how much I meant it.
Inside, I dropped my bags. The place was hot, and pretty clean, and very strange. After a year of living with my family, I’d forgotten the scale of a solo person’s life. I was astonished at how small my refrigerator was, how few bowls and plates I owned. There were cobwebs in the cabinet, dust along the hand soap. I found a stack of New Yorkers from 2019 and recycled them immediately—somehow they were repellant to me, these cheery oblivious articles from another life. A brochure for City Ballet’s spring 2020 season likewise seemed a miracle of hubris. Junk mail for my subletter, accrued in the front hall, stopped me cold. Strange to see my address below someone else’s name, as if I’d died.
It did not feel like coming home, this returning, not at first. It felt like stumbling upon the site of a house abandoned hastily during a disaster, which I suppose is exactly what it was. When Dennis called, I talked endlessly about the need to clean. What I was really saying: can we turn back time? Can we reverse all this?
Three days later, during an epic heat wave, I sat on a plywood bench (aka “in a bar”) with an old friend who was moving away. He listed all the things he had to do: finish work, pack up, buy a car. The brownstone where he had lived these past eighteen years? The landlords were selling. Everything that is solid melts away.
We were melting, too, in the impossible heat that had not slackened after the sun went down. Boxes, moving trucks, sweat and teary goodbyes—yep. Felt like August. And even as I insisted to him that the only changes to Brooklyn were minor, or expected, I was aware of lights going out on my mental map. That friend moved away. That friend moved away. Once familiar stoops belonged to strangers now.
Another friend, over another beer, bemoaned the exodus. He asked, “But what are we doing here? That’s not a rhetorical question. I just mean, what are we doing here?” He meant: why the astronomical rent, why the rats and garbage, if not for friends, for community, for fellowship? Why be here if everyone else has moved away?
Well. Everyone hasn’t moved away, of course. But it’s hard to deny that the pandemic plus the usual thirty-something exodus has taken its toll. I didn’t know what to say. Silently we sipped our beers and crunched wasabi peas.
The answer came to me slowly, over many days. The answer was not inside my apartment. It was in my building, where my neighbors kept laughing, delighted, when they saw me in the halls. It was the farmer’s market, where I paid too much for lettuce larger than my head. It was at the food co-op, where the man sanitizing carts flirted brazenly with me, just because he was bored and it was sunny, just because we were both alive, and together, for that instant in time.
As I swooped around Prospect Park and ran into neighbors and lingered on street corners, I found myself taking mental notes, as if preparing a community bulletin. So they’ve finally started fixing the potholes near the Parade Grounds, so Zion has shot up six inches and started playing first base, so the cops are still buying pizza from Smiley’s. But why isn’t Mario playing his saxophone in the morning? A new wine bar opened next to the old Applewood. Luis put a security camera above the mailboxes. Everyone, it seems, has adopted a dog.
As I biked and walked beneath trees glistening with rain, as I ate tacos and dusted baseboards, I replayed my friend’s plaintive question. Was New York “over?” If we could, would we go back—to before last summer’s reckoning, before the election, before we all so viscerally understood the indispensability of a safety net? Would I really want to “reverse” all this, to give up the time with my family, the closeness with Dennis? In returning, am I going back or stepping forward into something new? And what is that newness?
Lines from a Nam Le short story came to me: “If you ask me why I came to Iowa, I would say that Iowa is beautiful in the way that any place is beautiful: if you treat it as the answer to a question you’re asking yourself every day, just by being there.”
It appeals to me, this idea that you might ask yourself the same question every day. That you might ask it and answer it simultaneously, answer it not by thinking, or talking, or scrawling on a white board, but by treating your home—and the people who share it—as the answer. That their beauty might be an answer. That your being there might be an answer.
In the laundry room last week, I made plans to get a drink with the woman from 5A. Folding my clothes, I realized how glad I was to be part again of the messy social web. Brooklyn is beautiful the way Le’s Iowa is beautiful: it feels like an answer to some question my heart has been asking, over and over, all these long months away.