I ❤️ New York

I used to think a lot about the road not taken. The lives I could be, but wasn’t, living were a preoccupation of my late teens and early twenties. I made so many choices in that time and I could feel the weight of them, the way they would open or close certain paths, heading off some possibilities and creating others.

When I was sixteen or so, I bought my younger sister a choose-your-own-adventure novel. She was in her early teens and I hoped that I could make her love books like I did if I just gave her the right thing. I hadn’t read the book, but having a hand in the outcome of the story seemed like something that would engage her. In the end, it had the opposite effect; she tried to read the book straight through (which didn’t make any sense), because she didn’t want to choose the wrong thing.

…

My freshman year of college, I went to a small, weirdo, liberal arts school in Massachusetts. At the end of the school year, three friends and I took the bus to New York City. I don’t remember a lot about the trip, but a few things stand out in my mind—napping in the sunshine on the lawn in Central Park, going to the duck pond mentioned in Catcher in the Rye, thinking that I didn’t really like museums and then being the one that wanted to spend more time there than anyone else.

I was in Greenwich Village at one point, traveling between The Strand and the Peanut Butter & Co sandwich shop,1 and I stopped behind one of the NYU buildings—momentarily immobilized. NYU had been one of my top choices for college. I’d been accepted into Tisch, the arts school, but hadn’t gone. I told everyone that I didn’t go because they didn’t offer me any financial aid, which was factually correct but not actually the reason I didn’t go.

I stood there, in the summer of 2011, and I thought about the alternate reality where I had not been too intimidated to choose New York. I imagined the person I would be if I had not been scared, or if I hadn’t let that stop me. I looked around, like maybe I would catch a glimpse of that other me. I wondered if they were happy.

…

I thought less about alternative lives after college. The multiverse became an interesting thought experiment, not something woven into the fabric of all my choices. Maybe my decisions just felt smaller—more immediate, less course-setting. I’m not sure.

I didn’t really think about New York, either. I made a home for myself in LA and I thought, “the west coast is always where I was meant to be; I was running away from home.” I thought about leaving LA sometimes, but only in the fantasy way, where I would move to some unspecified destination and everything would be picturesque. And then I moved to Long Beach and thought, “oh, this is it. I’ll never go anywhere else.”

…

In September of 2022, I went to New York City on a birthday trip with two of my best friends to see Harry Styles. It was my first time really being in the city since that first trip 11 years prior. I felt indescribably good. Not just happy, at peace.

One night Christina and I were trekking back to the apartment in the rain2, and she was talking about all the things she didn’t think she could manage about living in New York. And for no reason I could really explain, I argued that it could all be more manageable than it seemed. I found myself making a case for living in New York, even though I had no reason to.

We left the city and I just kept thinking about it. I just kept imagining it. In October I started telling people that I thought, maybe, I wanted to move there.

I recognized that there were a lot of things about that first trip that set me up to be happy. I could probably feel happy in most places if I was there on a vacation with my favorite people in the world. And the weather had been good—humid, but not too hot—and completely free of the snow and gloom that had brought me crushing seasonal depression in Massachusetts.

So I created a test scenario for myself. I went to New York in January, alone, and worked remotely. I got a place in Bed-Stuy not too far from where a friend was living, and tried to approximate what life might be like outside of ideal-vacation-circumstances.

When people asked me how it was, I told them I was so happy to be there that I was willing to accept the snow flying into my eyes as I walked places.

…

I didn’t want to leave Long Beach. I wanted some way to live in New York, while still holding on to my life here. But that isn’t how life works; you can’t ride two trains at once. I also wanted to quit my job, and I was finally in a financial situation where I could reasonable do it. I told myself I could quit my job, or I could move across the country, but I couldn’t do both.3

I quit my job.

…

I was in New York at the end of July—a few days in Brooklyn and upstate for the weekend, celebrating a friend getting married. I ate good food4 and saw old friends and managed to fit a trip to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in. I felt content from the moment I exited the airport.

On my last day, I took myself out for a lox bagel and then had a perfect iced Americano. I tried to write in my notes app.

I’m in the city for nine more hours and feeling emotionally overcome. I am tired and dehydrated, which has turned my brain to a locked, possibly empty, box (I don’t have any business attempting to write this now). But I don’t want to leave. I love being in New York. It’s 95 degrees outside—there’s a heat advisory—and I don’t care. I will take New York in any condition I can get it.

I really was too exhausted to write anything. I gave up after that one paragraph, opting to nurse my coffee and try not to cry instead.

I cried a little.

And then, hours later, I left. I got on a plane and flew back to the life I have chosen again and again.

Not an alternate reality, but a lived one.

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