New York, N.Y., 2016
This was published in the Ladies of Leisure zine.
Author’s note: This was written at the end of September, before the election. After November 8, it might have been quite a different piece. One constant, though, is how the city makes me feel. So here it is anyway—a time capsule, and timeless, I guess.
I arrived in February, the day before my 26th birthday, running high on the adrenaline of the end of an old relationship. Everything fell coolly into place. Someone bought my violin; I had money for tickets and rent. Weeks before I left Melbourne, a friend told me Sally needed someone to take her room. I was swept easily forwards into something new. I’d never been to America.
New York runs at high altitude. The city, bright, stark and cold, burnt away my bruises and exhausted my endless thoughts. Sometimes burning out is a good thing.
Brooklyn is dirty and sprawling, not very different to a lot of Melbourne. My first week, on the advice of a boy I’d seen a few times, I spent Thursday morning wandering the light, clean rooms of the Whitney. I sent him a photo of myself on the roof: rugged up, grinning into the cold, Hudson behind me. I made some dad take it. Full tourist, utterly happy.
There was this note under a De Kooning painting, by a critic and friend of his: ‘New York, N.Y., 1955’:
“At the time we talked a great deal about scale in New York, and about the difference of instinctive scale in signs, painted color, clothes, gestures, everyday expressions between Europe and America. We were happy to be in a city the beauty of which was unknown, uncozy, and not small scale.”
Uncozy, and not small scale.
A friend and I keep track in lists. The night I arrived I pinned hers on my wall—which is smudged and white, and reflects thick, sticky gold light in summer, and cool silver light in the winter.
Wet leaves
Kissing cold lips after an ocean swim
Second dinner
Saying yes to everything
And I email her, all different emails, all different lists:
Rubbish everywhere
“Park closes at dusk”
Linen skirts on shaved legs
Sharing a bed with a friend
Smelling the perfume of boys you like in fancy department stores
Never getting enough sleep
New York is impersonal, in a way that makes you feel like a person. Crying on the phone to my mum on Elizabeth Street one night, also a Thursday—apparently still susceptible to cruel boys—I tried to tell to her why I like it.
“I’ve never been so happy,” I choked out through tears. “Even when I’m sad, I’m so happy.” And insane, maybe. But that seems to be fine here.
Because under the sweep of all the social codes—get out, meet people, network, be interesting but don’t be too interested, take the line-up of first dates only in your stride—there’s endless, clear space to be who you like. At the end, I’d found Melbourne stifling. No rules, total freedom to be yourself—and absolutely no space to do it in.
The practical bits: I have a job, where I write. I can pay rent. I seem to always turn up in the right place at the right time. (A balance, maybe, for spending six years in the wrong place with the wrong person.) I eat out too much and never buy groceries, so always hover on the edge of being broke. There are swerving cab rides, when my phone runs out of battery so I can’t get an Uber. The cab drivers never know where to go, which is a problem when your phone is dead. There’s the subway, always, where someone opposite you tends to be falling asleep. Or you are, until someone else who’s hopefully not a pickpocket shakes you awake. And hopefully before your stop.
The train to work goes overground, so even when I’m eaten up with anxiety (sometimes), or pushing back a hangover (sometimes), or tired (always), I see the skyline on the river. It gives me a happy punch in the stomach that I’ve only ever had before in love. A gold flush of there it is. Massive and ugly, and a sample jar of a whole mess of real, frightening problems—privilege constantly rears its head and I can’t do justice to it here—and there’s no choice except to keep moving. Endless fresh air, even amidst the smell of trash, sweat, sewerage, and fried food.
Mentally, I was cruising when I got here. Physically, I wasn’t. Weeks of oily hair, dry lips, pimples, unexplained rashes, odd swellings. It was like my body was processing something. It was too much. Then, just as suddenly and inexplicably, I leveled out.
Now my body carries the city in other ways: growing and shrinking depending on when I can be bothered going running. Thighs chafing in summer, more tanned than they ever were in Australia. There’s dirt everywhere, and when I’m not too sleepy I now shower before bed as well as in the morning.
And because the city’s always there, it’s even more vivid when it vanishes. Sprawling asleep under a tree in Prospect Park while friends lazily sweat and make plans for the evening. Lying in Central Park, looking up at leaves against the sky and wondering that the city can be so close. Head against the glass, watching the Hudson slide past on the train up to Dia: Beacon.
New York is unpretty, ugly even. But there’s so much room, and everyone is joyfully exhausting themselves trying to fill it. As kids in winter, my sister and I used to sprint along the empty beach, furious, exhilarated, lungs burning, until we fell on the sand. Here I have the same feeling. My atoms line up the right way.
And friends—moving here, born here—coming and going, become landmarks, treasures of flesh and blood. We compare notes, swap stories, make battle plans for work dramas, laugh about Tinder, and sometimes, walking down the street, clutch each other with something like liquid joy. We’re here. None of us worshipped the city before we came, outside of it being what it is: full, famous, creative, exciting, new. But we came all the same. A fuck-it-why-not.
“We’re such clichés,” we tell ourselves, but it doesn’t get rid of the elation. So we go for another drink, take a change of clothes at the bottom our bag, and keep throwing ourselves into the sea.