#it's not because new york is becoming quote unquote crime infested

[abbysroad]

a contribution to the discourse, or: five years in new york

I’ve drafted this post six (6) times in the last four months, and every time, I tell myself that no one wants to hear it and I stow the words away. But fuck it, this is my blog, and I’ll write about what I want.

I realized, in July, when I rented a car and drove to the Catskills with my boyfriend, that I hadn’t left the city of New York since December 2019. Even though I’m not from here, and I’m always welcome at my parents’ house in Massachusetts, I didn’t leave the city in April, stayed in my apartment and listened to the ambulances screaming all the way to Wyckoff, started trying to count them but lost track every day. I didn’t leave because I couldn’t risk unwittingly spreading the virus to my parents, and I didn’t care to take a bus or train to get there. And what would I do there, anyway? I pay rent here, vote here, pick up prescriptions from the pharmacy here, and, until some fuzzy recent moment, considered this my home.

Early on in the pandemic, it became fashionable among the New York media Twitter circle I inhabit to make fun of those who fled—to parents’ houses, to upstate cottages, to anywhere where birdsong could substitute the sirens. But really, how could you blame the ones who left? I keep thinking about this tweet that says, “The cleavage is not ‘people who leave nyc  / people who stay in nyc,’ it’s ‘people who see the city as a place of [cultural] consumption / people who see the city as a place of lived struggle.’” Allow me to be flip: Isn’t every place a place of lived struggle, barring, like, the Hamptons? Life’s a struggle, and we’re living it.

Let me show you something I wrote in my notes app on October 3, 2019 at 7:11 p.m, as I rode home from work on the L train, euphoric:

From the south side of Union Square, in the yellow dusk streetlight, I spy the creepy clock and my freshman year dorm. I’ve learned that it’s ok to start a story with a time and a place, that not all meaning grows from abstraction.

A year ago I slammed a door because my boyfriend came home in a surly mood and didn’t notice the lobsters I’d left crawling on the counter. Today I bought two more and ordered him to pick up a bottle of wine. I walked from Bryant Park to Union Square and bought Trick Mirror at the Strand. I entered the subway with insufficient fare, waited for the emergency door to swing open as it always does, and, with four other women, scurried through.

The subway rushes me to the home I have created, to the cabinets full of potatoes and rice and canned chicken stock, the refrigerator with butter, milk, eggs; the dull tip of the record player needle; the box of books in disarray. The rags ripped from sheets I’ve lain and loved in, that I use to scrub the bathtub and to wipe the counter clean. The pot I’ll boil the lobsters in, stolen from my parents’ house, which teems with things much the same.

And I know that if I needed to, I could start all over again. There’s no knowing if the world I built in four years will last a lifetime. Tonight, it doesn’t matter.

I couldn’t tell you what I was wearing that day, or how the lobster tasted, and the year-ago argument, now two years past, is a smudge in my memory. Sometime before it got hot out, but after things were bad, so April or May, I forgot my ATM PIN completely—the PIN I used to use every time I bought groceries or refilled my MetroCard—and had to have the bank send me the code in the mail. We’re going through a collective break from reality where our former selves are ghosts. All that sentimental bullshit now tastes funny in my mouth.

Disillusionment, I’ve decided, is realizing that the barista who used to give you free coffee once a week only memorized your name so she wouldn’t have to ask you every time you bought a bagel. That the optician, who remembers your name because his daughter is an Abigail too, is really just some schmuck who drives a car to work and dumps his trash on the sidewalk on the wrong day of the week. That you’ve bought all your acquaintances. That you could buy them anywhere—for less.

The tl;dr is that I’m moving to Denver at the end of the month, and we’ll have a big apartment with two bedrooms and we’ll be close to the mountains and we won’t know anyone. I work remotely. There’s nothing keeping me here. I love New York dearly. But you know how the old saw goes, about if you love something...