Should I move back to New York?

I moved to New York at a weird time. My graduate visa was approved in October 2016 and less than two weeks later, my mum knocked on my door to wake me with the news, ‘Trump’s won’.

I pulled my duvet over my head and messaged my then-boyfriend, ‘are you okay?’ He was a young liberal with political aspirations living in Washington DC and he’d stayed up late that night watching everything he believed in crumble around him, so no, he was not okay. I felt bad for him. He was my impression of the youth of America - energetic, idealistic, progressive - and I was very in love with him at the time and used to write bad poetry about him when we were apart.

I wasn’t moving to New York, by the way, because I had an American boyfriend. The American boyfriend was a byproduct of me wanting to move to America. I met him while he was doing a Masters at Trinity College Dublin. I had just graduated and vaguely wanted to travel and write. I’d become obsessed with the idea of living in America, enamoured with stories of other Irish people moving there and having life-changing experiences in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.

So when I met my ex it seemed like the universe was giving me a sign. Here is an American boy, in real life! Fate must be at play, not pheromones! Another reason I was drawn to him was because he seemed purposeful and ambitious, at a time when I didn’t have direction in life.

Helped by his talent for application forms, I got onto a marketing internship at HBO in New York City. My ex finished his Masters in Ireland, and moved to DC as he pursued social justice. For a brief moment, it looked like we’d be one of those couples that conquer the world together. We promised to visit each other on weekends when I moved there. We broke up before I ever set foot on US soil.

To be honest, I wasn’t nearly as upset about the end of our relationship as I was excited about moving abroad. It was never really about me and him. It was America all along. In the final weeks leading up to my departure, life seemed glittering and perfect and charmed. I loved telling people I was moving to New York. I loved telling them I was going to work for HBO. I had never travelled outside of Europe, and imagined myself as a modern-day version of Saoirse Ronan’s character in the 2015 film Brooklyn, off to America to make my fortune!

But New York was glum when I got there. Trump’s recent election hung over it like an orange, eggy cloud. I tried to tease a guy I met at a New Year’s Party about the ridiculousness of their new president-elect, but he sipped his beer, stony-faced. People were stunned, in the same way I’d been stunned by Brexit the previous summer. It wasn’t a good time.

As much as I liked telling people I worked for HBO, I hated the job when I started. I wasn’t Emily in Paris. My job was updating stock listings and product descriptions on the HBO Online Shop website. I was selling Game of Thrones T-Shirts and novelty Sex and the City mugs, making $20 an hour with zero paid time off, and a boss who told me more than once that the girl interning there the year before me had been better at the job.

There was no-one my age in my team, but determined to make an effort, I crossed office borders and tried to make friends with people I bumped into in the kitchen. After a few weeks of ‘Hey, how are you?’s, a girl called Marissa invited me to her birthday drinks. I thought, ‘This is it, I’ve made a friend’. I put on lipstick and heels and took the subway from my new apartment share in Bushwick to Alphabet City where she told me she’d be with her friends. At the bar, there was no sign of Marissa and she didn’t pick up any of my calls. After an hour of searching, I gave up, and took the subway home. Two days later I got a text, ‘OMG sorry I missed your calls haha I was soooo drunk hope u had a good night!’ We never spoke again.

As much as I had been in love with the idea of New York, reality slapped me in the face like a cold, concrete fish. Moving to a foreign city where you know nobody is brutal - and New York might be the most brutal of all. Even the infrastructure feels harsh. The subways screech. The streets are dirty. The skyscrapers trap heat and block out the sun. It seems to alter the psyche of its people. It certainly did mine, or so I wrote in an email to a friend in Belfast in September 2017:

When in Manhattan, I have begun to feel the city affect me. I have become ruder to strangers, more willing to push past people and elbow them out of the way, I say ‘Excuse me!’ on the subway instead of my old way of saying ‘Sorry…’ and in general I give a lot less fucks than I used to. About how I dress. How I talk. How I come across. The fear of being rude has been erased from me.

It felt like there was a fractiousness to the smallest of interactions. I’d never seen anyone openly argue with another stranger at 8 am before - but soon it was a common occurrence on my morning commute. I walked to Central Park and back on my lunch breaks, and when I passed Trump Tower, protesters were always outside. Anger everywhere. I couldn’t tell if New York was always like that, or just having a shitty time.

I knew one thing by the end of my first six months there: New York was not where I wanted to make my home. Looking back, I don’t think I fully appreciated what it would be like to move to a city with more people in it than the entire island where I’d grown up. I was surprised how much I missed Northern Ireland. I missed my family and friends. I missed BBC iPlayer and Tayto crisps. But I couldn’t afford flights home. I could barely afford rent. For the duration of my twelve-month visa, I was effectively trapped.

So, I stopped trying to force friendships with people like Marissa, and found other Irish immigrants; mostly old acquaintances from my university days who actually wanted to hang out. I filled my weekends. I walked all over Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. I took the ferry to Staten Island for a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. I subscribed to the skint newsletter and got tipsy at life drawing events. And by September, writing to my friend in Belfast, as much as my fantasy of New York had been dismantled, even I had to admit some of the romance was still there:

But it has something. Dress how you want. Do what you want. Be who you want. Accept things. Accept each other, or get the fuck out of my way. Aggression, tinged with optimism. Does any of this make sense?

When my visa expired in December 2017, I’d grown to love New York for who it really was. Though I wasn’t sorry to go.

But with Mamdani’s election, that old fantasy once again began to stir within me. Scrolling through his rousing soundbites at the podium, his optimism reminds me of my ex, or the guy he wanted to be. I remember how depressed the city felt when I moved there, and wonder what it would be like to move there now, when it feels more hopeful than it has in years. I think if I made a joke about Trump at a party now, it might even get a laugh. New York, you’ve changed. Should we give it another go?

Last year, I returned with my now-boyfriend, and I had fun playing tour guide for this English man, pointing out the Rockefeller Center and Times Square, as well as the landmarks of my past. As we walked hand-in-hand through Central Park, I could feel myself being pulled back in, imagining myself living there now that I was older and wiser and, crucially, no longer broke. I snapped out of it when my boyfriend was charged $20 for a cone and spent the next two hours raging that he’d been scammed by an ice-cream man.

xoxo Caroline