New York

November 2019

Future You here. I’m writing to you from Newark Airport, a place you will get to know well.

You don’t know this yet, but you’re about to go through some major growing pains. You only just moved to New York, but you’re not just going to live here — you’re going to work two jobs, move three times, juggle anxieties, make new friends, and fall in love with someone who lives across the country. You’re going to hone down your street smarts so much you’ll look like you never grew up barefoot in a beach town. You’re going to turn into the kind of person who kicks off their mornings with political podcasts, who carries hand lotion wherever they go, and who says things like, “this winter is so much tamer than last year’s.” You’re also going to gain fifteen pounds, and get hungover after only three drinks!

Your zombie commutes, your lunchless afternoons, your calls home, and your evenings cooking comfort food — all of it will stretch you to new highs and lows that you can’t even imagine right now.

And when people eventually ask you whether you like New York, you’ll be surprised to find you don’t know how to answer. This is the greatest city in the world (and everyone will keep on telling you that). But your understanding of New York’s greatness will have more to do with its capacity to challenge you, than moments that look like the movies.

One thing that doesn’t look like the movies: the trash bags lining the streets. When the summer heat starts to cook the garbage inside, the stench makes the whole island nauseous. It’s just one of the tradeoffs of living in the greatest city in the world, where there is no room for alleys.

There’s also no room for lawns in the greatest city in the world, which means dogs pee on the bare sidewalk — when they get their fifteen minutes outside. You’ll get used to stepping over their expanding puddles, along with all the other things people drop on the sidewalk: dime bags and condoms and chicken bones. One time you’ll pass AN ENTIRE BOWL OF MAC N’ CHEESE someone leaves at the top of the subway stairs at 23rd and 8th.

You’ll start to notice these things because you’re about to spend a lot more time on sidewalks than you ever have before. And right now you think walking sounds exhilarating; you’re excited to be out of a car and “really feel the energy” of the city. But you are about to walk everywhere. You’ll walk to the pharmacy, the laundromat, the grocery store, the liquor store — and you’ll haul everything back home with you, in both bitter cold and surprise summer thunderstorms. You’ll rarely have to walk uphill, but you will have to dodge the people who walk slower than you, which you’ll discover is nearly all people. And you’ll start to punish the worst of the sidewalk species, the people who walk while texting, by purposefully brushing up against them. But, you’re going to get to jaywalk — even in front of police officers! You’ll feel the rush of being a local each time you step past the tourists waiting on the corner for the lights to change.

You’ll make a periodic pilgrimage to Trader Joe’s, where you will direct your handheld basket through a battlefield of stressed-out shoppers while pretending you are less stressed-out than them. You’ll start to come prepared with a list, because there is literally no room for browsing, and you’ll chart out your route from the front of the store so you wind up at the end of the line, which gets so long it snakes through the aisles. Fortunately, you’ll always be able to locate it, thanks to the hero in a Hawaiian shirt whose entire job it is to hold a flag that says “END OF THE LINE.” While you’re there, you’ll experience what it’s like to be cut by grown-up adults, or left alone with a stranger’s shopping cart when they disappear to grab more groceries — even if there is a toddler sitting in it. You’ll learn to simply push the cart forward when the line moves and the stranger isn’t back, their child gazing up at you with big eyes.

At Whole Foods the lines are more contained, by shelves full of lib balm and $14 lifestyle magazines — but you will be crucified if you miss your moment in the multi-lane color-number system that directs you to one of nearly fifty checkout stations.

Most weeks you’ll avoid the crowds and scavenge what you can from your local grocery store, which has a name like “C-Mart” or “Metro Food,” and produce that’s already wilting. You’ll also have a corner bodega for the basics, where a forty-year-old man named Sammy will make you BLTs at two in the morning.

You will be stranded at various subway stations too many times to count, though it will usually happen late at night in Brooklyn. If you’re lucky, there will be an announcement explaining why your train is delayed, and it will always be dismal: a medical emergency, a body on the tracks, a police investigation. You will also find yourself trapped on trains that went local when they were supposed to go express, or express when they were supposed to go local. But a Charlie Brown teacher voice won’t always come over the PA to warn you that’s going to happen, so you will just learn to ride it out.

You will get used to the billowing heat of the subway, which turns into a special kind of hell in the summer. You will get used to the sweat stains and delayering. And you will get used to the loud “‘SCUSE ME EVERYBODY!” that bursts out as soon as the doors close. But you’ll never get used to ignoring the story that comes next, the person who circles the car asking for change, or the sadness that comes along with the ignoring.

You may not decide to switch cars the morning one man threatens to kill everyone — because he’ll be clearly crazy, and you’ll only be two stops from work — but you will decide to change course the day you walk into an empty subway car to find a man jerking off in the corner.

You won’t be ready for the smell curling up from the grates outside Penn Station or the roaches that scatter out of your kitchen’s electric socket. You won’t be ready for the human foot in the subway below Rockefeller Center that is so infected it reminds you of a geode, with all of its buildups and cavities. And you definitely won’t be ready for the day you get off the subway at home to see a male body draped across the stairs. You will hover long enough to see that the chest is not rising and falling. You will hurry upstairs to the MTA booth, where you’ll hear the station worker sigh, and you will feel the wind on your tears as you walk home.

New York will absolutely break you.

And then, it will piece you back together.

You won’t be the same person you were before. You just won’t expect the same things. But because the city annihilates your expectations, you will be disproportionately impacted by the good you see.

Like: the teens who carry a woman’s stroller to the top of the stairs for her — the same stairs where you passed the dead body. Or the grime-stained, middle-aged construction worker you watch comfort a pock-marked young druggie — on the same train where you experience your first death threat.

You will see strangers become friends, and you will see neighbors help neighbors — and it will make you a better friend and neighbor. You’ll start offering directions to mixed-up travelers, and fruit to hungry homeless people. You’ll hold the door for people who run to make the train, and the emergency exit for people who can’t afford a ticket. Not because you’re a hero — because that’s what you do in New York.

And even at the end of an hour-long commute with other people breathing down your neck, when you’re headed back to a house-of-cards apartment building that amplifies all the neighbors’ noise, you will discover an openness to strangers. You’ll make friends with nonEnglish-speaking fellow travelers, from the platform at Penn Station to the B52 in Brooklyn. You’ll chat with the old Jamaican man who smokes on your stoop in his sweatpants, and his grandson who lives right above you. You’ll get to know the girl behind the counter at your bakery, and the guy who does the trivia night you both go to. You’ll realize you are part of a community.

Would it happen in any other city? Of course it would.

But not with New Yorkers.

New Yorkers are bold and colorful, people who own what space they have and defend it and share it simultaneously. And guess what? You’re a New Yorker now. You’ll tell a car to “fuck off” when it nearly hits you. You’ll lecture a man at the bar when he forces a kiss on your friend. You’ll fight for your spot on the train, and you’ll fight for your spot at the company. But you will also speak more efficiently, share more openly, and love more purposefully.

Because of that, New York is the greatest city in the world. And when you inevitably run away from it, for someplace that is simply less difficult, you will find yourself a stronger person.