Today marks five years since I moved to New York City. It’s not the anniversary I expected—I had had an idea back in February that I might spend the day acting like the most outrageous tourist. Stroll through the High Line. Watch something on Broadway. Order banana pudding at Magnolia Bakery, or, if I felt lucky, a cronut at Dominique Ansel’s. Of course, none of that is possible now.
I used to have a tradition of going to a pizza place you recommended in our last session, Oregano in Williamsburg. I was about to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh and mentioned my internship in the city, and you told me you were from there. It was a solid recommendation. I live too far for them to deliver to my studio, but I’ve been checking on them these past few days to see how they’re holding up and I imagine the tradition can continue once the lockdown lifts.
Beyond pizza, I’ve been returning to a question you posed in that last session: after having spent my life running away from things—majors thrust on me that I didn’t want, friends I didn’t like who wouldn’t let me go, family who hurt me—what would it be like if I ran toward something instead?
Five years is a clear demarcation point that I’ve lived here longer than I ever did in Pittsburgh. It’s the oldest of cliches—I remember that 22-year-old in all her embarrassing, stumbling glory, and how she moved into the living room of a professor’s friend’s apartment in Ditmas Park, then took the subway to powerHouse Arena for the Brooklyn launch of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts later that same day. I spent that first summer not thinking about running away from anything, certainly not the fear of returning home to Philadelphia if I couldn’t land a job, and yet that 22-year-old would not have considered herself running toward anything either. She wasn’t running toward the city, though the cliche isn’t complete if she doesn’t credit New York in some way for, and here it comes, finding herself.
Prior to a casual trip to the Met, the professor’s friend called the museum “encyclopedic” in its scope, though it’s a word that I feel encapsulates the city as a whole as well. What I remember from that first summer is the limitlessness of what I could discover and the ease with which I could discover it, like the city was daring me to find yet another hole-in-the-wall cafe, or another obscure pop-up installation, or another nervous twentysomething or two who blundered into a literary happy hour event where every other person looked untouchable.
I can see, five years on, that of course I must have been running toward something, because I continue to run toward so many concrete somethings now, but I can’t pinpoint the catalyst, or series of catalysts, of when I went from not running at all to running toward. Even as so many people over the past few months have given their reasons for running away from the city or choosing to stay here, even as I sit in my bed knowing the world is at a point at which running in either direction is not an option, I keep wondering when that transformation began, like if I could locate it, I could make sure I’ll have something worthwhile and tangible to impart to that 22-year-old who, for the first time ever, had no idea what it was like to stop running.
Thank you very much for that question, Rebecca. I’m going to spend my anniversary quietly, reflectively, opening a present that I’ve kept wrapped for the last five years, and waiting for the city to recover so that it can run again.
Take care,
Monique