How are you liking New York? my editor-in-chief asks me.

More every day, I tell her.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s like that.

CITY SHENANIGANS

I’m going on dates with musicians and ivy league graduates, laughing over how vastly different they are from any of the guys I knew in California.

I’m standing in the train at rush hour, taking note of the groans as the conductor announces that this line will not be running anymore. You have not loved New York if you have not stood shoulder to shoulder with the 9-5 crew as subway rats scurry across the train tracks and laughed a little at the absurdity of it all. Running around those darkened tunnels, descending stairs that are so long and steep you feel they might lead to the center of the earth, only to emerge in daylight moments later, you feel like a rat yourself. We scurry. It’s comically endearing.

I’m walking through central park with hot coffee in my cold hands, stopping to hear to a jazz band perform the very first signs of tulips emerge from winter’s cold earth. Children dance to the music in their marshmallow puffer coats and charming old men stroll with newspapers in their hands and a look of contentment falling across their faces.

I’m having dinner on the Upper West Side with my brother and his girlfriend, listening to him get very excited about the urban planning of the Netherlands. We launch into comparing America to other countries, dissecting how poorly we approach food, time, and death.

It’s raining and the city looks like Gotham. Foggy, dirty, yet twinkling with brilliance and secrecy. I used to watch Marvel movies with my brother solely because I loved the grimy cities they always took place in. I wanted to go there. It looked like a playground of life.

I am waiting tables at a rooftop in Manhattan on a Saturday night. Someone is getting married. There is a tray of caviar in my hand and I am looking out the window and down into what I was informed was Beyoncé’s penthouse. How did I get here.

HOME

It has been about a month now since I left California and what has struck me the most is the profound sense of belonging that I have to a place that could not be more foreign.

I was always a homesick kind of kid. My brother was not. He could go anywhere and stay there forever, lost in the adventure of it. He was never ready to come home after a trip, something to which I could not relate. I needed home. We could have gone to Paris in the 1920s and I would be over it in a week. So naturally, I accepted that moving across the country would involve some kind of dance with a homesickness that I would not be able to circumvent. By a month I figured I would be intensely longing for California again. I know myself well and am used to being able to predict how I will feel. Of this, I was sure.

Yet, I was wrong.

Whenever I long for comfort and home, it is Brooklyn I return to. It is Brooklyn that brings me comfort. I love California but I don’t miss California and I didn’t expect that. I guess some places become so drenched with memory, so saturated with stories, that at some point being apart from them is the only way that you can breathe.

Hometowns can feel like being deep underwater. Stepping off the plane at JFK was like coming up for air.

Happy Sunday.

Click here to support a small artist with big dreams (me)