It’s been 2 years since I published a post here. I started several drafts, but each one was interrupted by life in some way… left unfinished, never shared. I don’t want to be like that anymore.
I’m back in NYC right now, and it’s no surprise that the wheels are turning. This city inspires me more than anywhere in the world, and I’ve traveled a lot so I feel confident saying that. Sometimes I wonder: What is it about New York that lights me up inside? Is this how everyone feels about their hometown, or is it just this spark I have with one particularly dirty, loud, crowded and gritty city?
I won’t try to understand it, but I will try to capture it.
Today, I woke up early, creaky after a 15-mile run I did yesterday in Central Park as part of my training for the Berlin Marathon (my second, but I’m having very mixed feelings about this one so let’s not get into that right now). One of my favorite things about New York is that, unlike in European cities, no matter how early you wake up, someone is up before you. The streets are full of movement. The cafes open when your eyes do. You’re always late to the party.
In Berlin, cafes don’t open until 8am at the earliest. On weekdays, most don’t open until 9am, and don’t get me started about weekends, particularly Sundays… At 6:30am on a Sunday, the streets are dead quiet. There are no cars. There are no people. There is nobody blasting hip hop from their dilapidated Toyota like the guy that just drove by when I was walking to grab my Sunday morning cappuccino at 7am.
I’ve learned to love and appreciate the quiet. The green. The peaceful, civilized, respectful silence of a country that doesn’t want to bother anyone and just wants to be left alone. Forgiven. Safely allowed to exist in its own little box of security.
But then I come home. I arrive in New York like a magnet finally finding it’s other half, pulled aggressively right back into the same funk and smell that made me want to leave. And it embraces me. It smiles. It makes me feel everything I hated and loved all at once. It pounds me with sensory input and makes me feel alive. Again. In a different way.
I’ve seen 3 dead rats with tails longer than my cell phone. I’ve also seen 2 live ones that were much bigger, and one cockroach that is burned into my memory forever. I’ve smelled piles of garbage that have been sitting in the hot sun for hours. I’ve eaten dinner next to truck exhaust and gone to restaurants where I couldn’t hear the people I was sitting next to. Living-in-NYC-me would scoff and sigh and be repulsed by all of these things, adding fuel to the endless fire of thoughts all New Yorkers have about possibly leaving this place. That fire always burns brightest on Saturday mornings when we sip coffee and look up what life could be like if we just lived in another city, town or country — anywhere that would allow us to have more space and nature around us… and maybe a fridge just for drinks.
But that would be boring, right? It took me years to find the courage to leave. No matter what, I needed this perspective, whatever it revealed. That’s where I’m at now. Seeing what I needed to see, feeling what I needed to feel, wondering what I always wondered: Where should I be?
Visiting-NYC-me sees things differently. Maybe the Rachel who left NYC is also just different.
Visiting-NYC-Rachel falls in love with this mess, like her first love that took so long to quit. She tries to let go of it, but it never works. She feels at home amongst the chaos. I walk by dead rats unfazed. I take photos of the skyline like a tourist who’s never seen it before. I look up, starry eyed at the layers of buildings that spread out vertically and horizontally before my eyes. I know them so well yet I’m lost in them every time. I’m mesmerized by the chaos. I smile at the food delivery guy on a bike fighting with the cops who want to give him another ticket. I listen in on every conversation I hear when I walk by, enjoying the pure, unfiltered honesty of it all. NYC may be a lot to handle, but it’s so fucking real.
I joked the other day with a friend about how crying on a stoop in New York is a rite of passage, and how you’re not a true New Yorker until you’ve cried in public, preferably on the steps of a brownstone you can’t afford. Breaking up on a park bench also works.
Of course, yesterday, as I was squeezing out one last mile of my run in Riverside Park, I saw a serious man and a sobbing woman talking it out on a bench. He stared into space, exhausted and wordless. She unloaded. I recognized this moment so well, because I’ve been there. This was clearly a breakup. An end. A chapter closing on a green bench, like so many others had before this one. I felt an instant connection with them. I wanted to tell them I’ve been there. Not once, but so many times.
New York City breakups are iconic. I’ve had my heart crushed in the middle of Grand Central Station. On a bench overlooking the NYC skyline in Brooklyn Bridge Park. On a Metro North Railroad as it pulled into the station. And over and over again — on the Upper West Side, on the Upper East Side, in Brooklyn, in the West Village and everywhere in between.
I’ve also fallen in love on these streets. Let’s not forget that part.
How do you leave a place that has seen so much of your soul? That has been witness to your highest highs and lowest lows? That has been there for you both when you are lost and when you are found? That’s worn you down and left you so raw that you give up on it, and then wake up the next day never wanting to leave?
No matter how much I explore the world and how much I fall in love with other places, New York City is baked into the layers that have made me who I am. Like a croissant. Like the buildings that stack up against each other, hiding your secret heartaches and joys in its shadows and housing your dreams in tiny windows that light up only at night. I am embedded in NYC’s concrete. Permanently a part of it. Like the cells shared forever between a mother and her child. The connection is indelible. I am the most me when I am here, and maybe NYC is the most NYC when I let it be this fantasy. Or is it real?
It’s too expensive. It’s too crowded. It’s brutal and dirty and smelly and loud and maddening and stressful and overwhelming and over-stimulating. It’s unforgiving. But above all, it’s home. There is nowhere in the world that let’s me dream bigger. No other city makes me feel this free, and this inspired. It is as imperfect as I am, and the more time I spend in Europe, the more I forgive New York for being the way it is… and myself for being the way I am. Unapologetically conflicted. Always exploring the intricacies of that inner conflict.
Forever in love with the knot it’s tied in me.
Travels with Tavel 