on the city

how quickly novelty fades.

the strange becomes familiar. the extraordinary turns perfunctory. the thing that once thrilled you curdles into something mundane.

i moved to new york in the middle of december. of course, i had visited many times before—a week here, a month there—but it had been years since i’d actually lived here. every time i return, i forget the same things. how loud it is: sirens, subways, someone screaming “fuck off.” how cold the winters are: teeth chattering, eyes watering before you’re halfway out the door. how lonely a city of eight million can make you feel.

the first couple of weeks, i was flailing. i used google maps to find the subway station one block from my apartment. i rode uptown instead of downtown. i walked for what felt like miles around my neighborhood to find a decent coffee shop, only to end up at a blank street. i didn’t know where to buy groceries, let alone floss.

two months later, where i was once flailing, i’m now floating.

i wake up promptly at 6:45 eastern. walk north on amsterdam. order my coffee from kieran, chat about how shitty the weather is. i finish my workout before nine. descend the subway stairs, swipe, stand, reread the essex hemphill poem mounted above the seats. every other monday, i bring my clothes to the dry cleaners and the korean woman behind the counter tells me about her daughter; she reminds me of my mom.

and almost every evening, i walk downtown to the theater and perform a show.

somehow, without my realizing when, the city shifted from a place i’ve been to a place i know. home.

and yet. there are moments—after the show, alone in my apartment, when all i can hear are the footsteps of the upstairs neighbor and the hiss of the radiator—that i miss the flailing, the chaos, the unfamiliarity of it all. every day felt like an act of wonder, each moment an uncovering of some small ritual of the city i hadn’t yet discovered.

but novelty, once expended, cannot be reproduced.

i confront this truth almost every night on stage.

i remember the first time i read the script. the dialogue, how strange the words felt in my mouth. i remember our first rehearsal. the character’s emotions, how they surfaced so readily, raw and immediate.

we’re now fifty performances in. the show has become second nature, every beat and cue sanded smooth by repetition. you could lock me in a room, blindfold me, cover my ears, and i’d still be able to recite every line forwards and backwards. what once required my full attention now commands very little, which i guess is a kind of mastery but also a kind of loss.

because there are nights, i’ll be honest, when the show feels difficult not because it’s hard, but because it’s too easy. words that once felt charged now feel hollow, drained of the power they once carried. fluency, it turns out, can become a sort of numbness.

in those moments, i have tried to summon the memory of how it felt at the beginning—the first time i read those words aloud, the feeling at that first rehearsal. i try to reenter, reawaken, that original astonishment.

but when i close my eyes and reach backward—nothing.

it took me some time to understand why this doesn’t work. it’s not that the memory is gone. it’s that the person who encountered those words for the first time no longer exists. i have seen this play; i have said these lines; i know this part. no man ever steps in the same river twice, said heraclitus, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man. the self who didn’t know cannot return; it is a door that only opens once.

so what i’ve been learning, night after night, is to stop reaching backward. to not relive the past. but to excavate the present.

although the text does not change, my relationship to it can. something i’ve said a hundred times suddenly has new meaning because i am different tonight than i was last night. a pause opens up. a word carries a different weight. a line about pride yesterday turns out to be about loneliness today.

material is finite. interpretation is not. language, if examined carefully enough, becomes inexhaustible.

perhaps people are too.

we talk about falling in love with the same person over and over again, a sentiment that sounds beautiful in the abstract but offers very little guidance in practice.

i’ve written about the honeymoon period before: the hormones, the electricity, the madness. but when the dust settles, and it always does, i think many of us fall into the same trap. we attempt to recreate what once was, chasing nostalgia, desperately trying to conjure a feeling that belonged to a version of the relationship, and a version of ourselves, that no longer exists.

but we cannot return to the beginning. we cannot fall back into the same love.

the trick, i’m beginning to realize, isn’t remembering what once moved you, but letting yourself be moved again, differently. the same traits can take on entirely new meanings depending on who you are when you encounter them. the stubbornness that once frustrated you becomes, years later, the moral conviction you come to admire. the levity you mistook for avoidance reveals itself as the resilience you can lean on. the generosity that once showed up as gifts and flowers now arrives as an arm around your waist, a glance in a crowded room.

there are always things to discover in the people we love, if we are willing to look at them with intention rather than longing. love never runs out, as long as we have the courage to see people as they are, not as they once were.

which, i suppose, is what i’m trying to do with this city as well. not to chase the thrill of last december, but to notice what this march might bring. to walk the same blocks, descend the same steps, but with new eyes.

to keep discovering first times inside of long ones—not because the city has changed, but because i have.