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They say you become a New Yorker when you cry on the subway for the first time. Or when you get flashed on the subway for the first time. By both standards, I’ve been a New Yorker since 2010, and I’ve become a New Yorker many times over since then.
Despite the tears and testicles, I love calling New York City home.
I love it here because everyone wears sneakers, because people find their spouses in Uber pools, because we measure the turn of the seasons with food carts: summertime’s piragua to autumn’s nuts for nuts.
Where you can meet the Philharmonic director while you’re picking songs on JG Melon’s jukebox, and be guests to his choral performance two months later. Where one doorman helps you understand the Buddhist philosophies in your yoga teacher training and the other doorman sells you weed. Both are helpful guides. Where, if you stay out late enough, you can catch the bread truck on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, making its early morning bakery delivery.
I love calling New York City home because my classroom is a symphony of Spanish and sonnets, Senegalese and similes. Because on November 9, 2016, the Union Square subway walls transformed into a mosaic of Post-its, messages of love for the discouraged, dismayed, and afraid. Because you can duet Defying Gravity with a complete stranger.
Because on a weekday evening, I might find a group of firemen in uniform in the grocery store shopping for dinner supplies together, or feel the grace of elderly women practicing tai chi, silently rebelling against the surrounding speed, and every now and then, if I time it just right, the lanterns in Central Park light up right as I run past.
It’s not all glory and glitter, of course. It used to freak me out a little, how closely my life rubbed up against the lives of others, our underwear in the same washing machine at the laundromat, sharing recycled air in a taxi, my face sleeping just yards from my neighbor’s feet, only drywall and delusion separating us.
But then one day, a gruff and burly exterminator came to temporarily free my apartment of cockroaches, and after he left, I found a little Olaf (the snowman from Frozen) sticker stuck to my kitchen floor. It just overwhelmed me, thinking about the tiny, adoring hands of a child placing that sticker on her father’s shoe.
Whether we consent to it or not, we share our lives with each other in this city. I was reminded of how it is a privilege to see life up close like this, in all its vastness, day after day. That this intimate preview into people’s worlds is an immediate source of curiosity, compassion, and connectivity.
By sheer necessity, private moments are forced in public places; I see snippets of them all the time, just sentences of their tales, fragments even: a girl fixing her sister’s hijab, a mother’s first day of school pep talk, two teenagers composing and revising a flirty text, a silent tear rolling down a ballerina’s cheek. And I feel it all. The juxtaposition of these experiences all in one frame is intoxicating, devastating, exhausting, and beautiful.
New York City is full of stories, and has shown me that there are a thousand ways to live a life. We get to meet them in others and try them out ourselves: the karaoke queen, the yoga instructor, the hesitant writer looking for magic.
All this variety urges me to reimagine what I can be; I see brave acts in my students and want to be courageous, I see brilliance in poets and want to ask more questions, I see pain in others’ eyes and want to be more careful. It’s like a mirror to metamorphosis, but it is also a map that reminds me of where I’ve been and where I’m going.
I can walk down Avenue B, and see the exact bench where I broke my own heart, but then two blocks later, find the apartment where a whole new life started for me, one where I refused to be small or quiet or limited.
I love New York because, like the graffiti along my bike ride to work, it reminds me:
Don’t wait,
No fear,
Protect your art,
Love.
Photos by the author