Apartment hunting in New York City is taking years off my life.

It’s a lot of emailing, texting, crying, and falling in love with exposed brick walls that dissolve like cotton candy in your sweating hands.

All because one day I was unlucky enough to fall in love with New York and lucky enough to have the kind of masochistic drive that is actually, if you squint and tilt your head, slowly getting me there.

Remembering why I love it helps. This is about that.

FUTURE TELLERS

My journals have always have been oddly prophetic in that they end and begin at serendipitously momentous chapters of my life.

I can’t explain it, but every time something major happens, it seems to coincide with the moment that I am due to start a new journal. I opened a new one with the pandemic, another on the day I moved out for the first time, and another on the day that I met someone who would end up changing me in ways I never could have seen. None of that was on purpose.

Now, I am watching the pages shrink in yet another little black book at a rate that I cannot ignore is perfectly aligned with when I will (hopefully) be moving to New York. I have a feeling that when I do reach that last page, it will be the end of an era. This era. And the start of a whole new one.

Nearing that end, I decided to explore the treasure chest that is the envelope in the back. That little sleeve that is always bursting at the seams by the time I fill the pages. I fill it with love letters, museum passes, downtown parking receipts, plane tickets, photographs, stickers, dried flowers, postcards, and random scraps of paper that I scrawled what I was convinced was the next great American essay on the back of.

You know, the good stuff.

FOLDED UP MEMORIES

I was flipping through that back envelope the other day when a folded receipt fell into my lap.

Dated July 20, it was from the rooftop bar in Brooklyn that I bought my first legal cocktail at this past summer. I remember that balmy night well.

I remember being freshly 21 (so long ago, I know) sitting in the back of a cab with every window rolled down, watching the city lights turn into galactic blurs as we got onto the highway. I felt like the protagonist of that daringly experimental artsy film you sat in front of for two hours and were never quite sure of what actually happened, only that something did.

Something did.

The air was hot, my face wet, feet sore. I was exhausted, exhilarated, and something else for which I don’t have a name. I had just spent the night running from Brooklyn to Manhattan, choking on the humidity, sitting in pretty bars next to pretty people, and trying to understand how it is possible to feel both exposed and invisible, seen and utterly unknown, all at once.

I remember sitting at the window of an industrial bar under some stupidly gorgeous factory-turned-apartment-building in DUMBO, watching drunken friends stumble down the street and barefoot kids run through the park, laughter rattling off the buildings for miles in a distinct cacophony that I can still hear playing in the distance. And I just sat there, stunned. In awe. Hypnotically falling into the kind of love my mother warned me about.

The kind that swallows you whole.

For nothing else existed. Not really. It was one of those moments that you can feel yourself remembering even while you are still inside of it. Even when it still feels far too real, too aching, too close to death, or maybe just life, to ever be sweet.

The sweetness comes later. It comes like honey, slow and sweet all over your skin, pulling you into it’s amber cocoon of rosy nostalgia. You don’t quite mind if you never find your way back out.

I never have.

FRACTURED NOSTALGIA

For some things don’t appear clearly until later. Sometimes you are on a street corner in Manhattan in the middle of the night, a bit too preoccupied with the sudden precarity of your life to see the beauty of the whole thing. I see the beauty of the whole thing now. It feels more like remembering a movie than remembering my own life. But then again, I guess that most things do the further that you get from them.

I look at this photo now like a scene from a film, forgetting that I was standing right there behind the lens. I don’t remember noticing the girl with her hands on her hips in the bottom center of the frame, but I see her now. I don’t remember the boat, or the laughter from the carousel, if there was music, or no music, only that I couldn’t believe so many children were running around New York City in the middle of the night.

But it was summer. I see now that I was one of them.

A PHOTO

It’s all right there in the dazed blur of the photo.

I have been enamored with photographs lately. I have always loved them, have always taken them, but they are carving out new spaces in my mind as I grow older. There is so much to remember, so much to hold onto. I find myself whispering to my past selves in every place that I greet them, stay here. Remember this all for me. Someone has to. Someone must.

I think as humans we tend to focus on moments that we wish we could change or forget. But what about the ones you can’t live without, can’t breathe without? The ones that you are pretty sure imbedded themselves into your the vertebra of your spine just so that you can stand up straight in this world?

Or maybe, just the ones that you find every once in a while, almost by accident, crawling over your hands like a ladybug that you are scared to hold, but scared to lose.

Like this one. Like the hazy black and white image of me waving at Manhattan from the edge of Brooklyn that might as well have been the edge of late adolescence. The edge of one era, and just the beginning of another.

It made my head spin. NYC in late July was supposed to make me fall out of love. Hot trash, immovable air, gum melting on the sidewalks like molten slime, these are the things I waited for. Yet I was only falling more in love. The kind of love that is keeping my vision straight and clear as I grow dizzier and dizzier with the unique endeavor that is metropolitan apartment hunting from a half a world away.

Send luck.

Love, m.

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