On New York City

New York City is the kind of place a midwestern, suburban girl dreams of visiting in her childhood. It is the epitome of big city lights, unimaginably larger than downtown Columbus, Ohio. Unfathomably more filled with everything: restaurants, smells, people, trash, windows, cars, bikes, at least according to the movies. New York City is where grown-ups go, where people who want to grow up move. Take 13 Going on 30, The Devil Wears Prada, or Felicity. It is where people find love, see When Harry Met Sally, and where they reunite against the odds at the top of the Empire State Building, see Sleepless in Seattle. It is where the action is: look no further than the Toby Maguire Spiderman movies. It is where talented musicians, unlike myself as I would come to realize, go to perform solos in Carnegie Hall. It is also where people use cool words like “bodega” and “schmear,” and even though the streets are numbered, people manage to name every inch like SoHo, NoHo, DUMBO, FiDi, and MSG. And finally, it is where humour lives: take Saturday Night Live or Friends. In other words, it makes Columbus look drab in comparison–all its manicured lawns, friendly neighborhoods, cul de sacs, and quiet by 10 p.m. New York City, the city that never sleeps, is everything different from what I had known, and that made it the ideal place to aspire to live, someday.

As the eldest child, I have always attempted to act the part. This culminated in an undiscovered drive for sophistication in high school. I would force myself to do things grown-ups did so that I could be deemed: mature. Coffee, in all its bitter blackness, was how my mom got her day started. Two cups, always black. I shifted my Starbucks Frappuccinos to black coffees with a splash of skim milk. Everyone on the internet told me tea is good for you, so I bought green tea and drank it in the evenings, trying to make it through the whole mug. I opted for studying rather than video games like my brothers. I started listening to Brahms, my dad’s favorite composer, rather than Taylor Swift like my friends. The final step to my transformation would be to live on my own in New York City.

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After seemingly fulfilling this dream, earning myself a summer to live in NYC in the middle of college, in a place just outside midtown in the Gramercy area close to Trader Joe’s (more importantly Trader Joe’s Wine Shop) and the green six line that went straight up and down the heart of the city, the dream of the city persisted, unsatiated. The summer experience felt wispy, slipping through my fingers, leaving me confined as a suburbanite forever. I could never belong in NYC. It would instead always be that place of dreams, the city that never sleeps, where something exciting was bound to happen every day.

It was a hazy summer–not from the shimmering asphalt in the heat, nor from the car fumes of the packed streets, but because my imaginative childhood self and present self came face to face to meet and shake hands in Central Park. They met quite often, on the corners of particularly New York sidewalks–perhaps by a bagel shop, or one of the thousands of Starbucks–on the subway, or by the hospital before walking in for work; really anywhere that reminded my present self of my past visions of the city. The city of skyscrapers. Maybe they convinced each other this was all still a dream.

I lived on the 21st floor of an apartment-style NYU dorm. I had to take the elevator to get to the ground floor. I could smell the fumes of the finance bros in the mornings on my way to eight a.m. hospital shifts. They were the ones in suits with leather shoes, greased hair, and a heaping does of cologne; their scent was a reminder of the six figures they earned while I, in my ugly bright red polo and hospital ID lanyard, looked like a middle schooler and was earning zero dollars to work there.

On my way back into the dorm building, the smell was entirely different. After leaving the hospital, walking the few blocks, pushing through the hot stagnant air of a NYC summer and past the revolving glass doors of the dorm, I would become aware of the human stench that clung to me, a smell unique to the emergency department where I spent my time. And I swear, it wasn’t me; it wasn’t a B.O. smell, or my “shower clean” deodorant wafting up my shirt as I ran around pushing patients to x-ray or grabbing someone an extra cup of juice. It was the smell of flesh, of a bunch of bodies in one room only separated by constantly opened curtains. Sure, urine, sweat, and occasionally feces wafted through the ED, but those were temporary scents. What stuck was the human smell, the smell that I only noticed when stepping into the confined metal elevator, on the long ride up to the 21st floor. It hit a second time when I stripped immediately after getting into my room, as I pulled my red polo over my head and let it drop to the floor.

Being so high up in the building and in a corner room (aka extra windows), there were endless lines of lights visible from the floor to ceiling windows in the common area. Sometimes I would just stare out at the lights, how they changed from day to night, how it never really got dark in NYC. I could see the Chrysler building from the window by my bed. Those were fun lights. They would sometimes alternate like a light show, constantly changing colors, and on the Fourth of July they flashed red, white, and blue.

 It was when I stared at those lights, though, that the unexpected could happen. Maybe an ambulance honking and blaring its way by on the street below, not making much progress due to traffic; we were close to the hospital avenue. One particular night, my roommates and I heard a big crash, 21 floors below us on the street. We rushed to the window to see; it was maybe an hour after the sun had set. On the corner to our right, at the intersection of 3rd Ave and 23rd St, a hoard of ambulances, police cars, and fire engines quickly assembled. Squinting, we could see what looked like a vehicle on the sidewalk which had crashed into the glass bus stop on the corner. In the group chat my roommates and I were a part of, full of fellow hospital volunteers, we asked if anyone on shift had someone come into the trauma slot from a vehicular accident. A young female who was on the phone with her boyfriend, waiting at the bus stop, was hit by this rogue car. She was stopped mid-conversation by the shards of glass and impact of the car. I believe she was in critical condition and ushered away to surgery. We didn’t find out what happened to her after that. Such is the nature of the ED: fleeting.

It surprised me, this summer haze, my memories romantic and blurry around the edges. The dreamlike fuzziness lasted past leaving the city, the images never solidifying in my mind. The reality of living on a busy street with clubs around the corner, of breathing in the urine stench of the steps leading down to the subway, or the hot and rotting food waste that just missed the trash can or leaked from the piled black bags on the sidewalks, of the constant bustle of people rushing–always rushing to get where they were going, never diminished my awe. My naïve notions of NYC, borne from movies and media, still tinted my perception. Reality didn’t wake me from my haze, rather, I left NYC with a drive to return. The next time I went back, for I knew I would be back, I was determined to dispel this childish dream. I needed to grow up, become a grown up. The rosy picture of NYC needed to be squashed so that I’d be content wherever I ended up, which I predicted, would not be NYC.

Perhaps the dreamy haze was my childhood self’s way of telling my present self to loosen up. Maybe it wasn’t time to complete my transformation into adulthood; I wasn’t even 21 yet. I glided past the realities that kept my parents from the city–the filth, the pollution, the cesspool, and the crowds. If I went back, it would be on my own.

I entered the summer preparing to grow tired of the noise, of my randomly selected roommates, of my sweaty walk to work in my non-breathable red polo, business casual pants, and “work appropriate” shoes. I thought, let’s get this experience out of the way now, so when I’m old and nostalgic I can look back on my time living in NYC without regret.

But I found that in the city, I felt free. Maybe that’s dramatic, but there was a sense that I was invisible, yet confident. I could wear a new outfit, tie my hair up a different way, and no one would pass judgement. I could spend my whole day wandering, or people watching, and no one would doubt my place in the scene. I could pick a direction and just walk that way for hours, not fearing boredom; I would find odd spots like tucked away open gardens sandwiched in an alley, or a particular stream of graffiti that I recognized from other parts of the city.

If I wandered south, I’d hit Chinatown, passing the Strand, some bookstores with rainbow flags, and the iconic Madison Square Park Shake Shack… the park always smelled of bacon and weed and burgers. If I headed uptown instead, I’d pass through K-town (really, K-street), past NYPL, and eventually come to Central Park where I’d dip into the shade of trees that sometimes leaned over the path. I would see some cute dogs, find a spot to sit in the grass, and maybe even bring a book and snack from Trader Joe’s if I was feeling particularly lounge-y and luxurious; I’d spend an afternoon in my Ray-Bans in the park. Though, if I went uptown, I learned to avoid Times Square (tourists, am I right?). If I went west, all the way, I’d hit the Hudson. I would pass by the piers, the golfing, the games, and the very New York version of parks which paled in comparison to the open fields, tennis courts, wooded trails, and acres of soccer fields I had back in Columbus.

At the same time, I didn’t feel lonely while out in the city. It was only back in the apartment, when my roommates were on shift and my boyfriend already asleep, 1,000 miles away, when I lay awake in the dark looking at the ceiling from my cheap, dorm twin mattress with sheets I lugged in from Bed Bath and Beyond some blocks away, that I felt alone.