New York: A Love Letter
A letter to New York, which I am leaving again but will always return to
Hi reader! Times are mad, and I appreciate you taking the time to read this amid it all and am sending you love and strength and compassion through the digital ether.
I also wanted to share I released my debut album last week. It’s called Portals, and it is mostly about the eternal nature of change, impermanence, and transformation. You can listen here or here:
New York City has been my home for the past seven-and-a-half-odd years, punctuated by a year in California and a year on the road.
At this point, Brooklyn feels more like home to me than anywhere else in the world. New York is a place I keep returning to because of that, but more because of a strange sort of magic I feel here. It’s a subtle kind of magic that lives more inside of the place than on the visible plane, a strange warped dreamlike quality that is energetic rather than material.
New York is a place where things shapeshift. You can walk the same avenue for years and suddenly see something completely different and new. You can take the bus down the same street for years and never see a certain glittering gem of a dive bar your next-door neighbor visits every single weekend.
This city unveils itself in pieces, almost as if it is choosing who to allow into which of its many facets. There are endless rivers running under its surface, endless rooms of life you can jump into if you can only find the door into them.
The real New York, or at least the one I know, exists in the cracks in the sidewalks, in the clumps of vines pouring between buildings. It exists in the glowing purple light in the darkened building, and in the cathedral crammed between projects and trash-filled gardens.
New York is a place where ugliness and beauty are as intertwined as strands of DNA. To live here you have to learn to see the beauty in the ugliness. In the junkie’s tired smile, in the heaps of trash on the sidewalks bathed in neon lights, in the way the whole thing turns on like a great machine eternally beating, beating, beating towards something, towards possibility, towards life. Whatever force animated the first burst of light in the darkness of nonbeing is certainly present, if mutated, in New York.
This city is a place where people come to chase their dreams, and I am, for all my efforts to quell my endlessly rushing and desiring mind, still a dreamer.
New York is full of many living dreamers, and also it is full of the ghosts of all the dreamers who have walked these streets before. At this point, almost every street I walk upon has a different memory attached to it. Each corner is inhabited by different ghost or, more often than not, a specific recollection of a different night with someone I loved.
I don’t speak to so many of the people I once loved in this city. Yet I see them everywhere. Sometimes I feel the city hums with the sound of all of its ghosts, echoing with the force of all the dreams woven together and pressed into its concrete avenues.
And yet New York is also endlessly new. It is endlessly being reborn. Old institutions die and crumble and are reincarnated. The city warps. Precious and priceless old developments are paved over; others are saved; institutions seem unimaginably tall and powerful until one day they are just gone, sucked back into the ever-turning gears at the heart of the city.
New York is also a place where anyone can become invisible. It is a place where the best of the world merges with the worst of the world in one great endless, twisting tide.
Celebrities walk past people who just arrived in this country. Everyone is looking for opportunity. Everyone is looking to make their way through the winter. Everyone is waiting for that sweet sound of the subway train when it finally rolls into the station.
New York is a place where you find a church next to a temple next to a mosque next to a weed store next to an ancient rent-controlled apartment inhabited by the wisest old artist you’ll ever meet. New York is a place where people come to disappear and become someone new and to fall in love.
Me and New York have a rhythm now. I continue to run away, citing all the things I don’t like about the city — the noise, the cold, the lack of nature, the pressure and force of it all — yet I keep returning.
I feel like a stranger here, like I know no one, and yet all four of my grandparents were born in Brooklyn and Queens. Crown Heights was where my grandfather’s family settled after coming in from Russia, and I’ve walked past the building where they lived many times. My maternal grandfather was born in Bushwick Hospital. My maternal great-grandfather famously sold hot dogs at a stand near Coney Island when he arrived from Germany in the 1920s, not speaking a word of English and determined to exchange his Jewish past for a new life.
In New York I’ve lived in an old bell tower atop a former schoolhouse. I’ve wandered Prospect Park in all seasons, burying stones blessed by psychics in the pond. I’ve wandered bodegas late at night like a possum scrounging for scraps, as messy-haired and wild-eyed. I spent a year living in a consecrated sacred house where every wall is dedicated to one of the four directions.
I’ve danced in sky-high rooftops by glittering grand pianos and I’ve spent many freezing nights waiting for buses. So much of my time in New York has been spent alone, yet I was never really alone — I was always surrounded by this city, a living entity, ever-changing.
I often think about leaving when I am here. My heart longs for the trees, for the stillness. I know that this isn’t the place I’m going to stay in forever. Even now I am preparing to leave again, preparing to travel further, preparing to go on my next journey off into the wild unknown once more. Yet I know I will return. I always do.
I am now nearly ten years older than I was when I moved here. It has been slightly terrifying to come back this time and see how many people are so rooted in their lives, firm in their careers and ambitious. Some are married now, some are even moving out and up into the suburbs. Change is the only constant, here and in life.
Still, others seem to stay frozen in a dazzling eternal youth. Some seem so intertwined with the fabric of this city it’s hard to imagine it without them.
New York is a city of concrete, but it is alive. Cities, like houses and plants, can be alive, and I feel New York’s beating heart unveiling itself slowly to me whenever I return to it. This place can seem heartless, yet it has not betrayed me yet.
Coiled in its arms of steel and brick, I often feel so small. The skyscrapers are so vast, towering above the East River like gods. They never fail to take my breath away even after all these years.
I really never thought I’d love this place so much. I have met such wonderful, brilliant souls here — witches and writers, healers and sweethearts, and the bravest warriors and most hardworking artists I’ve ever known. Ultimately, it’s really the people that keep me coming back time and time again. It’s always been the people.
Yet I’ve also spent so many subway rides feeling so alone and so devastatingly sad about my own life or the state of the world or a mix of both.
New York can be a bitterly difficult place. People are always rushing. Everyone has a wall or two up. There is a sense of urgency and desperation written into the grey, dingy walls with their maps of graffiti and their Virgin Mary posters.
But perhaps that’s what makes it more satisfying when you do find a place of stillness. When you enter a room and see a group of smiling faces and lit candles waiting for you. When you’re able to carve out something of meaning in the great mad miasma of it all.
Here the pigeons and the gargoyles and the skyscrapers and the red midnight skies all conspire together to create the story of this place. Here the lonely midnight poets merge with the big stars and the people sleeping on the sidewalks. Here everyone is alone and striving and no one judges anyone else. Here it’s easy to see how easily we could slip into other lives or jump worlds into some other reality, because here every street is a new dimension.
Under it all there is the stony earth and its many rivers. Under it all there is something solid and true, something that catches me every time I touch down back on these familiar yet impenetrable streets.
Here is the world contained in a city. Every type of person. Every type of dream. Every type of magic. Every type of pain and every type of wonder.
New York I’m leaving again to travel far. I know I’ll be back, but I’m not sure whether I’ll call you home again. But here back in Brooklyn, with an altar to the Divine Mother in front of me and the sky glowing through the iron bars on the window to my left, I remember why I wanted to call you home in the first place.
Because of all the beautiful ghosts who did first. Because I wanted to follow them. Because I wanted to find god, love, beauty, and art, which are so inextricable from one another that they’re basically one in my mind.
Because, at the end of the day, I wanted to write to you, reader. You who is as remote as the city itself and yet as resolutely alive. You glitter in the darkness, as much a stranger to me as all the faces in the windows or subway stations, and as spectral and material as Pound’s petals on a wet, black bough.
I wanted to write to you.
And so I am.
I’ve never held any desire to make it to New York. Even just seeing as I flew out of Newark to Ireland, was overwhelming to witness. But the way you write about it makes me wonder if I’ve judged it too quickly. Made a visit is in order.
Beautiful enough to make me reconsider how much I dislike nyc 😊