Writing New York

During my sophomore year at Overpriced Private University, I took a class called Writing New York. It is important to note here that it later became the class that most influenced me, more so than any creative writing workshop, because everything I read and learned made the city feel like a living creature and not some cement jungle with a maze of unmanageable subways running underfoot. The syllabus included E.B.White’s Here is New York and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Patti Smith's Horses. And there I was, living in the middle of all of this history. On the first day of class we filled out the usual questionnaires: name, major, email address, etc. Then the twist: we had to name our favorite place in New York City, presumably by which the TAs could prejudge us. I probably wrote "Washington Square Arch," its existence reified by every Overpriced Private University student who poses under it at orientation and again at graduation, but looking back I realize I didn’t yet have a good answer to that question.

I couldn’t have listed the Boat Basin at 79th Street on a summer evening with a friend, or the spot along the Hudson on a clear winter night when you can see a Ferris wheel and the Statue of Liberty lit up in the distance. I didn’t say the front seat of The Cyclone after eating a Nathan’s corndog and a funnel cake, or a bench at The Cloisters on a sunny autumn morning when the leaves start to fall, or simply the edge of my apartment roof with the Midtown skyline glowing in the background of a perfect first kiss. I couldn’t imagine these places and moments then – I was only one year old in New York Years. I’ll turn five at the end of this month, and if I had to answer that question today I’d have a hard time narrowing it down to just one place.

I think I would say Central Park, although it seems silly to name 843 acres as my “favorite place in New York City.” Hardly a day goes by that I don’t run or bike or think about being in Central Park. If I spin my office chair 45 degrees to the right, I can look through the windows behind me and see the all the way to the northern border at 110th Street. I know every hill and dip and mile marker along the drive, and I’m proud of that knowledge because I worked hard to acquire it, but the familiarity isn’t what I love. I’m drawn to Central Park because my image of it as a place, a favorite place, is constantly evolving with each new memory there.

The hill where I realized I had a stress fracture during a 10K race is replaced by the hill where I finally got down into my drops and pedaled at 27 mph without braking. The rowboat pond where I spent a leisurely afternoon a few summers ago is replaced by the rowboat pond that I hobbled to in my bike shoes during the final transition of a relay triathlon this past spring. The nervousness I felt at the thought of leading a pack of runners during my first week of coaching is replaced by confidence now that I know where I’m going and how hard I have to run to get there.

Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m living on borrowed time in Manhattan, like this isn’t my real life yet. I get artwork framed but never hang it up on the walls and I can’t commit to a new sofa because this is just temporary. I know that some day I’ll trade my pre-war for a colonial in the suburbs and my Metrocard for a Volvo with a bike rack on top, but if my present life doesn’t quite belong to me, that future feels downright stolen from someone else.

Whenever I start to feel like this, I read Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” to check my progress on her timeline of living in Manhattan and remind myself why, exactly, I want to be a writer:

“…Some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be the same again. In fact it never was…but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”

And just like that, this borrowed time doesn't seem so gratuitous and I know that I have a few more years until I've overstayed my welcome, a little while longer before I'm cleared to land where a patch of grass isn't something for which I have to pack snacks and picnic blanket.