this is like my favorite thing about new york is that when you live there you think that you live there and you feel like you live there and you feel like you’re never going to leave and you feel like it’s your city and it’s where you belong
but that’s what is so fucked up about new york is that you’re always just a visitor
unless you were born in queens and you’ve never left queens in your entire life
the majority of people come from somewhere else and the majority of people leave and it’s like a revolving door and that’s why you feel so special when you’re 23 and in a bar and you’re like this is mine now this is like i can do whatever i want with this and you do and that’s whats so great about it but at the end of the day new york also does whatever it wants with you
Sarabeth sends this to me in a voice note this morning. I hear her quick steps on a busy road. Maybe she’s in between classes. I’d just told her about the tension between Andrew and I during our stay in Manhattan. (Brooklyn, for whatever reason, was totally fine.)
I’ve romanticized this trip for months. New York is our city of beginnings. New York is the city where we met, or if we’re being technical, 'matched.’ You were literally the first girl to match with him on the app, our friend Abby tells me. New York is where we lived one block apart, where we traversed Central Park together daily on our commutes. New York is where he met my family, where I met his family, where we screamed at each other and where we told each other we loved each other. We haven’t been back together in two years.
So when he tells our friends how sad he feels to be there, how depressing it is to return to New York as an outsider, I am crushed. To cope, I stare at Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis and think about my impression of Andrew during our first date. I wonder about the version of myself he held as he enveloped me in that obligatory goodbye hug outside the 81st street station. The feeling of when you only kinda know someone and your mind fills in the gaps with assumptions and judgements to curate and project a fuller portrait of him.
Newman compared his painting to a human encounter:
“It’s no different, really, from meeting another person. One has a reaction to the person physically. Also, there’s a metaphysical thing, and if a meeting of people is meaningful, it affects both their lives.”
The painting is enormous. If you stand up close, you’ll only see this smoldering intense red. But then as you step back, and the painting unfolds on your periphery, you notice layers of paint, the zips. I want to ask Newman: how do you know a meeting of people is meaningful?
For me, New York was always there. New York is still there. When you grow up near New York, you don’t call it New York. You call it The City. It’s been in my life for as long as I can remember as different versions of itself that have changed in time.
But for Andrew, New York was always New York as the idea. New York was a place away from home, a fixture of culture, a treadmill of hustle and success and promise. New York stitched itself into his identity — to family, friends, classmates, he became Andrew, the one in New York. I can’t comprehend what that loss feels like for him, but I’ve since recognized that the sadness he feels about New York has nothing to do with how he feels about our life together in Pittsburgh.
Sure, to Andrew, New York is sad (even depressing). New York, to me, is nostalgic, euphoric. New York is expensive and gross and loud and not at all mine, not anymore.
