Welcome to New York. You’ve got a nice accent.

My Uber driver smiles and I laugh because I have never been the one with the accent before.

FEBRUARY IN BROOKLYN

He’s asking me about the cost of living in California but I am looking out the window at them. The trees. The trees I loved when I would visit in the summer or the fall. The trees that made the city feel like a playground of energy. Moving here in the dead of winter, the thought of seeing them bare and brittle sounded sad. I was prepared for a less beautiful world than the one I remembered.

Yet when I looked out of that window, I only fell in love all over again—just with a different world. I could not believe the multitudes that each tree contained, how indefinitely the branches seemed to divide and extend, growing thinner and thinner like nerve endings as they crawled into the sky. Sunlight bounced off fire escapes, illuminating centuries of stories that I will never be done reading. My driver, having seen my frozen face from the rear view mirror, resorted to quietly singing along to Rihanna’s “Diamond”.

What came next was such a blur that I don’t know if words could ever pin it down. I hauled my enormous suitcase up the famously steep brownstone steps, understanding at once how Kurt Vonnegut died on them. And then I met my apartment. You think it won’t be as good as you imagine. You prepare to be disappointed, especially when you sign the lease without ever seeing it in person. You don’t think that it could really be what you hoped.

But then it is.

On the table was a vase of fresh flowers from my landlord and a welcome note with a shiny pair of keys. I looked around and tried to comprehend how any of it was real. The detailed molding, the enormous windows, the wooden floors, the original marble threshold. I looked out the window and saw the same tree-lined Brooklyn streets I fell in love with years ago, back when all of this was just a dream. Back when my flight had a return date and the charming apartment was not mine.

I CAN TELL YOU THIS

All to say, I cannot tell you how surreal it is to finally be here. But I can you tell you this.

I can tell you that at night the trees cast dancing, skeletal shadows across the floor and the wind howls. I have never heard the wind howl before. It is very much like being dropped inside of another planet, being here, yet I somehow have never felt more at home.

I can tell you that one by one, lights flickered on, catalyzing the evening spectacle that Edward Hopper preserved all too well. The one where you look out of your window and into an endless array of portals into other people’s lives. Someone doing dishes, folding clothes, cooking dinner. I fell asleep in the soft glow of other people’s mundane realities.

When I woke up, my phone read twenty-seven degrees and it occurred to me that I was in New York all over again. I pulled on a sweater and gloves and walked through the frozen air to a nearby coffee shop, feeling at once how strange and surreal it is to know that I don’t have to return home in a week. That this is, finally, home. And let me tell you, it’s a very difficult thing to walk down the street in Brooklyn and not look like you are about to have a seizure from overstimulation. It’s everything I can do to keep both feet on the ground as I pass by yet another brick cathedral or gorgeous townhome.

You think it won’t be that great. But then it is.

I can also tell you that the little kids of Brooklyn are cooler than anyone could ever hope to be. I’m standing on the corner, feeling my eyes grow watery, wondering if it’s possible that my hair has frozen, when little kids strut solo into school, waving their moms goodbye with their little bare hands. Each carries some kind of outgoing personality that New York kids just seem to have.

So I’m there on the corner and my face feels like I stuck it in a bowl of ice water and it’s all so exciting and monumental. I pull on gloves and it feels like a big moment. It was an absolutely mundane activity, one that no one around me thought twice about, but for me it was an initiation. And you only get those just the once.

THE CHARM OF NEW YORK

But then again, when I think about a metropolis, about New York, I don’t think it is ever possible to wrap your hands all the way around it. Can you ever really master something that is constantly changing? Maybe that is part of it’s charm. Maybe we love it because we know it will always be so much larger than our understanding of it could ever be, and the magnitude of that, the sheer infinity of it, makes life feel immense. In many ways, you get to continuously experience this city for the first time, over and over again. People say that, anyway.

They also say it’s the mecca for artists, a statement to which I can attest. I was in a store in my neighborhood, adopting new plants in place of the ones I had to tragically leave in California, when I started talking to the guy working there. He ended up being writer and a successful photographer whose work I recognized. I told him that I write for a photography magazine. It was all very New York. It was also very New York to haul a fig tree several blocks in the winter wind, avoiding low hanging branches and compromising a good majority of peripheral vision.

Which, let me tell you, is not ideal when you’re in the city where crosswalk signs are mere suggestions. Yet here, no one looks twice. You could walk an elephant down the sidewalk and New Yorkers would say they have seen it before.

I came home to a very strong delivery man hauling the enormous boxes I shipped across the country up my to door. I was partially surprised that they made it here at all. I opened them up and held Patti Smith’s M-Train in my hands, the book I used to stay up all night reading, vowing that one day I too would walk out of my New York apartment and eat brown toast with olive oil, sipping black coffee as I scribbled in a journal. I knew I would do these things. Yet how strange to have been right.

I fill the kitchen with glasses and bowls, listening to jazz as I watch Brooklyn unveil herself through the windows. Street lamps flicker on, the wind begins to howl, and unlike in the summer, you get the feeling that everyone is inside. There is school and work in the morning. Dishes to be washed. Beds to fall into.

It feels like home.

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