I'm Leaving New York

with music by Bssymrgn

My first love was my mother. My second was New York.

I don’t remember when I realized that the city was a special place. There wasn’t any specific moment where the lightbulb went off and I thought, wow, how lucky am I to have grown up here. Maybe it lingered in the back of my mind, something I was always conscious of. I just know I must have figured it out at some point, and then for the rest of my life I knew it to be the truth.

I knew it when I’d stay with my grandparents and meet kids at summer camp. Their suburban jaws would drop when I told them where I was from.

“You’re from New York?!” they’d say with as much admiration as there was for a nine-year-old to give an eight-year-old (which, as the universal laws of the schoolyard command, doesn’t allow a great deal).

It could’ve been that every movie I’d ever seen, and at least one TV show playing at a time, took place in New York.

It could’ve been what we were taught in school, and how. Washington D.C. is our nation’s capital, but first, of course, it was New York.

Whatever it ended up being, it was this that made me swallow a smile whenever I told people where I was from (but only if they'd asked first).

And so from a very young age the “wow, the Big Apple!” or, “the city that never sleeps!” or, “hey, I’m walkin’ here!” or any other platitude people felt compelled to tell me forced a poorly hidden cringe. Everyone has their own idea of New York, but if you drew a picture of my soul it would look like a map of the boroughs. Staten Island included.

A child doesn’t know reasons, only things. A child doesn’t know that midtown is like that because of all the tourists. A child doesn’t know that they wait through airport security because of the towers that fell in their city. A child only knows that midtown is crowded and airport lines are long.

Sometimes we’re given explanations. Because we have nothing else to go off of, perspective becomes fact. Once learned it is very hard to unlearn.

My mother always told me that celebrities liked New York because they could get around without anyone fawning over them. It was a very New York thing, she instructed, that when you see a famous person, the most you do is nod your head. Then you go about your day, and they go about theirs.

I went to the same ballet school as David Bowie’s daughter. At a recital one year, Iman walked in the door. My father began to say, “is that…?” My mother, jaw clenched and eyes fixed, responded “yes. Stop staring.” Somewhere in the back sat Mr. Jones, platinum blonde hair affixed with a baseball cap pulled down, and he looked like a regular dad. She looked like a regular mom who happened to be a supermodel. You come to meet a lot of those.

I do have a picture with a Jonas brother in Union Square. We are only as strong as our most ardent principles, and only as weak as those that we break every once in a while.

For my life, I loved being a New York City elitist. Anywhere semi-urban was provincial. Westchester was as good as the countryside. It’s cute that they call that place in Massachusetts, population 650,000, a city.

New York style arrogance is something you carry around with you as your neck carries your head. Living in my New York bubble, with my New York friends, and my New York sense of self, was high and mighty. Charming only half the time.

A middle-aged woman at a backyard barbecue tells me she had the perfect hotel when she came to visit, “right in the center of Times Square!” I smile and nod, that is perfect. Lord forgive her, she knows not what I do.

People I would meet from elsewhere, kids from college, would tell me “it’s always been my dream to live in New York.” Well duh, my first thought went, why on Earth would anyone want to live anywhere else? Their statement, usually followed by “for a few years,” was a slap that stung.

Dreaming of life in New York limited to “a few years” implied the city as a place of transition. They’d have fun, they’d work, they’d pay rent, and they’d settle down and raise their families in a different, more sensible place. They’d come to live but wouldn’t build a life. This dream of theirs was a stint. An adventure. It was something to fill in the gaps. Something to start a story with “when I lived in New York.”

They’d move in, anyways. And if you could believe it, they’d seem to think they were at liberty to complain. The city is more than a place. It’s a philosophy; a theology. As a consequence, people seem to think they can disparage it. It’s punching up in a way.

It’s a shithole. It’s dirty, it’s dangerous. They laughed, I cried. That was where they lived, but that was where I was from.

I scraped my knee in Tompkins, wept in silence on the L Train. My girlhood gone in Beacon's Closet and my rites of passage prescribed in the shape of the skyline. It wasn’t Xanadu, or Gotham, it was just. The city. It was home. It played in the background of my childhood memories, and its icons were merely the setting -- watching my parents fight with each other while we ate at Veselka; emerging a mean girl on a field trip to the Museum of Natural History; my Delaware ID taken by a bouncer on Ludlow.

Worse, maybe most insulting of all, were those who tried to claim it as home when in actuality it wasn’t. What aggravation I have to hear someone tell me they are from here when they’ve never owned a green MetroCard, let alone an orange one. Being born in the Bronx and then living two years before your family moved to Jersey does not count. Tell me which high school you went to, then we can talk. But you probably wouldn’t know of mine, it’s a small Catholic girls school on the West side (unless you do, and then it’s kind of a Cosa Nostra between us two).

It was around this time that I started to resent the city. Leftover teen angst, or whatever it was, became a creature that haunted me. It’s a shithole. Dirty, crime ridden, morally bankrupt. Increasingly unoriginal. That’s the one that hurt the most.

It was the summer when the girls wore Pinterest-crafted boxers and soccer jerseys and big huge baggy jean shorts with Sambas while the guys placed their keys on their belt loop carabiners, and I became disillusioned with the idea of New York.

We were supposed to be individuals, dammit. Even the smug look that painted their faces was the same. Their creative expression was unsurpassable. Bold, ballsy. Singular. Well except for their buddy in Bushwick, and also everyone at that one bar in Nolita, and also the girl they saw on the train yesterday and also her friend. All irony had been lost-- “irony” itself was repeatedly misused in conversation.

That winter I refused to go into Manhattan. Everything I needed was in Brooklyn anyways. I took pictures of overflowing trash cans as if to prove some point to someone. The photos ended up garbage themselves, cluttering valuable space in my celphone memory. Here I was: standing on the corner, staring down piles of to-go containers, and making more of an ass out of myself than usual.

We had arrived at a great paradox, you see. The place was infested by tyranny in the form of rodents. Odors I took as a personal affront. It would’ve been okay except for that we were simultaneously facing a losing battle of surface level sterility and ever-rising rent.

I felt the same degree of indignation directed at two opposing parties.

One, the camp of recently arrived Manhattanites that refuse to leave their porcelain palaces. Bella Union? I ask, incredulous. Suggest a bar in Brooklyn. Brooklyn? They recoil. It’s just Williamsburg, I say. I lose.

The others, those infiltrators of the places formerly Williamsburg. They make their homes in areas which they have to explain, until that sweet day she comes, and the place is irrevocably hipsterfied. There is short-form-video-content delineating afternoon itineraries, a smattering of matcha cafés, and the deli finally carries seamoss (by that point, bodegas will have ceased to exist). Watch out, Rego Park. It’s only a matter of time before they get you, too.

I have to force myself from grabbing each of them by their shoulders, shaking them until their big heads wobble back and forth, and tell them, you don’t even know what cool is!

The city clamped an iron fist around my neck and I could no longer breathe in fresh air, if only the kind I’d become accustomed to with smog, and piss, and the smell of a joint being smoked on the subway car.

These four walls of my childhood bedroom suffocate the woman I’ve become.

It is this, ultimately. The loss of childhood. The growing up of it all. The hardening of adulthood.

God forbid I become one of those people who constantly reference the good old days without ever noticing how good today is. Living in perpetual nostalgia of the past only makes the present slip through our ungrateful fingers, and before long it is the source of all nostalgia again. I’ve got too much self awareness to keep acting unaware.

I heard someone say that people from New York make it their entire personality, without realizing that nobody actually cares. Maybe the city isn’t that important after all. Maybe it’s time to write about other things.

Besides, who am I to be the gatekeeper of the most populous city in the country? Why on Earth would anyone want to live anywhere else.

Even though New York is my world, it isn’t the whole world. A lot of the people that I grew up with have moved away. My best friend lives in Wisconsin. Others went bad, made the move to LA. Then again, I could go and see some of that world myself.

I know that there are people who feel the same in other places. I could go to London, Tokyo, Casablanca, Buenos Aires, Berlin. Madrid. I’d find people with their own homestyle arrogance; their own umbrage towards the tenderfoots. I’d know it is the love of their city.

I love New York, so. It spits on you so it can mark the spot to kiss your forehead. It’s the beacon of hope, the center of the universe, and at the end of the day it stands that all the clichés were true. They were clichés for a reason.

I have to leave because I want to miss it. And to miss something you have to leave.

Start spreading the news.

by Bella Ve