goodbye/ hello to all that
in Didion fashion, we leave the liminal space
There was a general air of malaise.
Restlessness. A white noise constantly hummed in the background. I don’t know when exactly Alex and I both knew, how the realization sank in - perhaps it happened slowly, and then all at once.
It’s time for us to leave the city.
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I so wanted to like New York. For one, how could I possibly not like a city with this much arts and culture? Moreover, New York is the only place I’ve lived in where people constantly solicit my opinion of it, usually expecting a certain answer: it is the greatest city on earth. It’s everything one can possibly want and dream of. New York or nowhere. So many people here proudly proclaim all this. Not liking the city is non-consensus and socially unacceptable.
Hence, I tried in earnest to trace the origin of our malaise here. Perhaps we were doomed from the beginning – both Alex’s and my parents spent their 20s in New York in the early 90s and detested the city so much they’re hardly willing to come visit us now. Alex’s parents settled in sunny Los Angeles; my parents raised me between idyllic Upstate NY and futuristic cities in Asia where everything was built in the last decade and spotlessly functional. Then onto four glorious years at Stanford. Were we too spoiled?
Or perhaps the malaise is nostalgia over the California I abandoned. Life out west always felt boundless in a getaway car: impromptu escapes to Half Moon Bay, leisurely drives through giant redwoods, dining slowly in Healdsburg and Carmel, seeing the Pacific glazed by the afternoon sun off Big Sur, the chimeric flickers on the horizon, ever receding, ever diminishing. This is how we fell in love with life and each other: wandering, free, as quiet witnesses entrusted with the world’s most beautiful secrets, wanting nothing other than the present.
Instead, New York often ushers a want for everything: there’s too much artifice, trash, and scaffolding; too many crowds, lines, and sirens; too much eating out, going out – too much to do and too little time. There’s the highly mimetic spectacle of competing for tiny tables at hard-to-get restaurants, jam-packed rooftops, and the last patch of unoccupied grass on Sheep Meadow. Humidity clings to skin and smells cling to concrete. Concrete buildings cast drab shadows onto the concrete pavement.
The malaise intensified. It quickly began to push us out - weekends to saccharine sugar sand beaches in Hilton Head, to emerald lakes and forests upstate, to LA and the Bay Area, to Miami, Chicago, and DC, to farms in Vermont, to Costa Rica, Dakar and Vienna. As Joan Didion wrote in Goodbye to All That, we were temporary exiles on some indefinite leave in New York. The city became a liminal space, a place where we would just stay for another few days or weeks until our next departure. We were attempting to fill a fathomless hole in futility – an oxymoronic search of the want for nothing.
“No. The way you got sideswiped was by going back. The blossoms showing in the orchards off 101 was the incorrect track.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Winter in the city was brutal, endlessly gray and leafless. I’d yearn for warmer and brighter days back out west, days on highway 1, days hiking in the Hollywood hills under the soft hazy sun. These were, as in Didion’s words, “…the kind of day[s] when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East”. Stanford was often in my dreams – I’d be rolling across Meyer Green on my bike, my cheeks warm and radiant from the splendid sun, simply content. Then I awoke to the bleak and difficult East.
For much of winter, Alex and I made a habit of retreating back to the refuge of our apartment. I’d stay in for days at a time to block out all the cold, crowds, and mayhem right outside on Fifth Avenue. I felt callous, guilty of not going out more, of living in a polished ivory tower rather than in the “real” New York outside. I so dearly missed the post-dinner strolls Alex and I went on during college, the serendipity of finding lavender and rosemary by the roadside and combing through Salvatierra, Mayfield, and Frenchmans to stumble upon Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hanna House. I don’t know how to stroll in the city.
Yet New York contains multitudes: the lowest lows are often juxtaposed with the highest highs. A trash bag-piled alleyway can be en route to the Whitney’s brilliant Hopper retrospective or thrilling glass seats at the Rangers game. The cold outside only makes the warmth of ducking into the Ace hotel lobby or reuniting with friends in a small studio on Carmine Street all the more precious. Cinematic moments happen every single day: the random acts of kindness from strangers, the romanticism of hailing a yellow cab on Central Park West, the rhythm of block heels against cobblestones downtown, where the creative energy feels unstoppable and far away from midtown’s corporate monolith…
So winter eventually passed. It felt like a transformation overnight - trees donning new leaves, flowers in bloom, allergies in full swing. I cannot deny that I reveled in the breezy days of spring and the balmy early summer. The city has its remarkable way of luring me back, if only momentarily, assuring me that the trash and noise and crowds and scaffolding are all worth it. Do I maybe like it here? I felt an uneasy ambivalence whenever I got asked the question.
It was in this ambivalence that a whole year snuck by. In mostly hurried tempo, the past jostling the present, vanishing as quickly as its immediacy. New York is a continual reminder that time passes.
We had to decide on whether to renew our Manhattan apartment lease. To be thorough, Alex suggested we also consider areas outside the city within commuting distance, perhaps across the Hudson. Skeptical, I took the ferry from W. 39th Street for the first time and arrived in Hoboken. As soon as I got off the ferry, it was like a heavy weight lifted off my chest - a weight I never knew was so heavy. The Manhattan skyline from Hoboken looked a lot more magnificent than I’ve ever felt in it. I realized how long it has been since sunshine brushed on my cheeks the same way it did as I biked down Meyer Green: warm, sheer, splendid. The sidewalks are wide and clean, footsteps sparse and unhurried, townhouses charming. I wanted nothing more.
We decided to stay.
You should be enjoying your 20s in New York. Why are you moving away? Aren’t you too young to be leaving the city?
People would ask, so Alex learned to offer his canned answer, in the exact words of Justin Timberlake’s Dylan to Mila Kunis’ Jamie in Friends with Benefits: “I’m from LA, I like my open spaces.”
I was delighted to discover Didion had a similar defense mechanism in 1967:
Finally, I now realize my real malaise is that there was never a golden rhythm for me in the city. I have always preferred tenderness over callousness, trees over cityscapes, cozy nights in reading and writing and painting over pulsating dance floors, the comfort of cooking at home over constant dining out. I cherish my strolls in peace.
So this is our goodbye to New York for now – and hello to rediscovering it from a slight distance. To walking slower, moving beyond the liminal space, and preserving the want for nothing.
We will be back to visit often.
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