After a few days in new york
I could not stop remarking on the amount of people, on how they rushed toward my face, an unending assault of human beauty. My brother and sister-in-law and friend all laugh at me, a broken record. I could not stop remarking on how every face was so different than the one before, the one after and after and after. I could not stop noticing the amazing diversity with which one can dress themselves, the limitless interpretation of bodies, the lack of judgement one feels when in the fullness of definition.
The city is wildly different than when I lived there in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009. When my older brother first moved to Williamsburg it was 2003. My mother and I dropped him off at 66 Hope Street with his few bags. We moved him into a basement, the whole thing dark and grungy. Now, Christina and I smoothly check in to a swapped apartment just a few blocks away, it’s modern and comfortable and bright. Chanel and Hermes and Patagonia and Nike and one too many gelato places line the streets of the neighborhood.
I realize that the women walking past me in their 60s and 70s and 80s were in their 30s and 40s and 50s when I first began to interact with this city on my own. I see the kids who prowl the streets in their hunger and their curiosity and though I feel the same I remind myself it was nearly 20 years ago that I was in their shoes. Over the course of four days I ask myself how something can feel the same when everything has changed.
I have thought for many years that this is where this story begins: On 103 and Amsterdam, four blocks from my apartment on a cold October evening when I got the call that my grandmother was dying. It was in the ensuing weeks and months that I grappled with my first death, when I truly understood that something once held could never be reached for again.
I dropped out of university. I wandered the streets aimlessly. I bartended, I let marijuana answer questions, I passed the time. Two startling facts revealed themselves to me: I didn’t know my grandmother, and I didn’t know myself. I left New York.
—
My older brother has since left, but my younger brother has been in Brooklyn for nearly a decade. He’s a tattoo artist in Bushwick, something he put in hours and weeks and months and years to learn properly. When I got my first tattoo at 18, I excitedly showed Christy. “Don’t tell anyone,” I said. “Wow,” he said. “Sick.” With every square inch of him now covered, I miss his skin.
I arrive to New York with the plan of some birds and a line of poetry. Lying awake on my brother’s futon sofa in the night, the street noise keep me alert.
His house is saturated in traditional tattoo flash. Everywhere around me are roses, daggers through hearts, swallows, pin up girls, cartoon figures, skulls and snakes and fierce creatures. A screech of tires brings lions to mind and I think of those who prowl outside our home in Montana.
“Is it a mid-life crisis?” James asks repeatedly over 2024. It doesn’t feel that tidy, I tell him, searching for the words to describe my impulse to run hard into the unknown. What do I fear? I wonder, the cool spring air coming through the city window.
—
“Take this with you, it’ll take the edge off around family,” says Tony, tossing me a few pills. He’s a drug addict but he cares for me immensely, always checking in to see if I am ok at the end of a shift. “How’d the night go?” He’ll ask, and offer me a joint. We’ll smoke it there on the sidewalk before I wash the last glasses or we’ll go up to the roof and take it all in.
Once I get to California, the family tension is high. “You should know,” my uncle told me and Jeffrey at lunch a few weeks earlier, “Depression runs in the family.” My brother and I look at each other with eyebrows raised at the tone-deaf comment, as if we had already not had full bouts of our own. As if we were not now in them. Later, we sit at our grandmother’s bedside, Jeffrey holding her frail hand. She had stopped eating months ago.
At the wake, I take one of Tony’s klonopins, ignorant of its intended effect. Within an hour I’m sobbing hysterically in the second pew. My parents are paralyzed in their surprise, my mom’s best friend and her son look sideways at me across the room. Jeffrey sits down and holds me.
—
We go to a rave, me and Christy and Monae. "I like to get there early,” says my brother. "I like watching the dj build the set from nothing.” It’s three hours into it that I see what he means, my body moving in response to a sound whose origin story I understand. It’s the people now pouring through the doors who aren’t sure how they got where they find themselves. I lift my arms and sway.
—
It is hard to reconcile the many versions of self we all contain. My assumption is people numb themselves to possibility, as I myself have done before.
Christina and I approach Lincoln Center, my heart nearly beating out of its chest, though it’s not until the end of the second piece that the tears come. It’s true, I can never really express what ballet stirs in me, and I will never answer for why I didn’t try harder. What I came to understand in 2009 is: There is more to me than unanswered questions, unfulfilled desires.
It’s really only mountains lions I fear.