nyc diary

Dear April,

I’ve been in New York for a few weeks and I thought I should write something about it. For a long time, I had nothing to say. I’ve visited this city so many times, that I have neither the perspective of a tourist, nor a local. My experience of this city has no real patina to it. But nothing feels particularly new to me either, because I end up seeing the same people and doing the same things and eating the same food.

For the first time in nearly seven years, I am not working, and I am taking to the glut of free time in my life with mingled glee, desperation, and triumph. I haven’t woken up on a Wednesday with nothing to do in years. Now, all my Wednesdays are free, and my Thursdays too, and my Fridays. I have sea legs on dry land; with each day so vast, spring so moist, food so expensive, the subway so loud and my apartment so small, I am constantly on a mission to take the edge off and make being here feel “worth it”. So yeah, let’s definitely get dinner, I say several times a week. The city is teeming with people. There are endless frozen yogurt shops to line up for. Everyone wants to go somewhere, or is planning to go somewhere, or is already on the way. No one here wants to sit still. And maybe that’s the real reason I have nothing interesting to say, because that would require reflection, and reflection is born out of stillness, and I’m in fact typing this on my phone while power walking to the subway station.

thursday

For absolutely no reason whatsoever, this log will start on a Thursday. My roommate, T, and I had decided earlier that week to go to Diljan, an Afghan bakery in Brooklyn Heights. It is a cold and balmy day, which normally would have annoyed me, but I’ve just gotten a trench coat that I felt very chic in. I tell my sister this while getting ready, and she informs me that only losers use that word now. I say that I’m going to continue to use it anyway, but already it has begun to evoke the image of a woman in skinny jeans with side parted hair. Anyway, the trench coat. I put it on that morning while Facetiming my cousin who was in the car on the way to her wedding. Looking at her face felt strange. When we were little, we used to share our clothes and whisper-gossip about the boys in our lives. Now she was about to be a married woman. I meanwhile, was about to take the subway 30 minutes south to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a pastry.

On the way to the pastries, T and I debate stopping for coffee. “They’ll probably have coffee at the bakery,” I reason. She agrees. The bakery, it turns out, does not have coffee. I stare at the barista, and try to guess if she is trying to be cute with me. She isn’t, and they really don’t have any coffee. In lieu of coffee, we settle for glasses of water, which we sip in between bites of a lamb samosa (too cold) and shir pira (too sweet) while sitting outside (no indoor seating). Do we expect too much of bakeries? In my opinion: no!

I watch my cousin get married. She is a pixelated blur of green and gold over an 8-way Facetime call. I wonder if I’ll remember this moment. Years from now, when we reminisce about her wedding, would I recall sitting hunched on a damp bench somewhere in New York, holding my breath as she repeated her vows? Melodramatically, I think of a train that is moving too fast for me to jump on, carrying her away to a far off land where they speak funny and eat weird.

T goes to work. After a few hours in Brooklyn Heights, I take the G back to East Williamsburg to meet up with my friend A at Smør. Smør is a Scandinavian-ish bakery in Brooklyn where you can get rye bread and cardamom-flavoured things. For the last two weeks, nearly every single person I make coffee plans with has wanted to meet at Smør. “How about Smør?” A texted me last week. “Sure!” I texted back. At Smør, we chat about the books we’d recently read, third spaces in Brooklyn and Toronto, the Duchamp exhibit at the MoMa, and American health insurance. As the bakery begins to close, my friend bravely asks the barista if they are giving away the cardamon buns on the display shelf. They are not, she says. We leave empty handed.

After A and I split up, I have forty-five minutes to kill before my dinner reservation. I consider going home to rot in bed. However, this is New York city, where time is money, money is power, power is pizza, etc. I decide to walk to McNally Jackson to pick up a book I’d been looking for a physical copy of. On the way, my sister texts me, asking me to call her. She’s just decided to go to school in Toronto and has a lot to say about it. I hear her out as I slowly make my way to the bookstore. It’s grey and overcast and my pants stick uncomfortably close to my body. I am holding my breath, and I don’t even know why. I wish it would just rain already. My sister wonders out loud about the passage of time. Didn’t I think it was crazy how our children would never know these versions of us? Did I think that I would remember how living in New York felt when I was much older? I look at her bare face and warm eyes, and wonder if I’d remember this moment too, being struck by the profundity and tenderness of a teenager when I least expected to.

I take her back with me to the apartment, where she vetoes two of my outfits for dinner and wholeheartedly endorses the third. Dinner is at a place I have been trying to eat at for literal years: the Four Horsemen. I feel decidedly less excited about the meal. After three weeks and lots of dinners out in the city, the novelty of eating out has worn me out. I can still feel the sweet pastries from this morning congealing in my stomach. I find myself longing for a soggy homemade salad, a simple herbed meatball with some pita, even a fried egg on rice. I curl my lashes, throw my trench coat back on, and leave. At dinner, T, K, and I order oeuf mayonnaise with squid ink, yuba pomodoro, a pea shoot salad, and a seafood fried rice. For dessert we settle on a sticky toffee pudding and a mille feuille. The whole thing costs what I consider to be a stupid amount of money. Over pizza at L’Industrie later, we agree that it, like the pastries this morning and the weather today, had been underwhelming.

On the way home, it begins to rain.

friday

Today, T and I have plans to watch Hard Boiled at the Lincoln Center. However, I wake up to a text from her: after many gloomy, overcast, sticky, scorching days, the weather forecast for today was excellent, and would I want to forgo the movie for rotting in the park? “Down,” I texted back, and promptly fell back asleep. I roll out of bed eventually and force myself to go on a run. I am turning thirty this year, and every day this month so far has been a depressing physical reminder of this fact. Every day, I wake up feeling like a desiccating corpse and coax myself back to life by drinking half a litre of water and anywhere from one to three coffees, dry swallowing my supplements, stretching my neck, lower back, hips, and glutes, and taking a piping hot shower. Running these days has been less about getting faster or stronger, and more about propping my body up to last me another day of eating and walking through this city.

Tony Leung abandoned, we grab sandwiches at Court Street Grocers, take the G to Prospect Heights, walk to Canyon Coffee to pick up coffee and cake, and onwards to Prospect Park. In Prospect Park, we walk through a vast green meadow. It is midday on a Friday; the park isn’t crowded, but dotted all over the green are small groups of people lazing in the sun. Across the skyline, the sky is a steady, vivid blue. The bread of our sandwiches is stale, the filling too wet, and the cake too dry. We spend ten minutes robustly lamenting an experience that is becoming all too common during our short time in New York: paying exorbitant prices for mediocre food. Was the West Coast better at making sandwiches? Why didn’t they use an oil based batter for this passion fruit cake? Are we falling victim to Instagram hype? Why do we feel so gaslit all the time? And so on. But even that isn’t enough to lessen our good mood. The day stretches out before us, and we settle into a comfortable silence. I finish the final chapters of A Field Guide to Never Getting Lost, and begin the book I bought yesterday, Stoner.

Hours later, I wrap up at Prospect Park, and made my way over to Sukh for dinner with T and her friend J who she thought I’d get along with. The interior of Sukh looks like a train, which I find charming.

I think it’s worth mentioning here that I really am having an exceptionally good time in New York, bad weather and lacklustre meals notwithstanding. I’ve been thinking about how this month has felt different and better than other months, and I think it comes down to the fact that IRL is really back. I’ve lived in a few different cities over my twenties and it is just true that NYC is a city in which people seem to have an insatiable appetite to be out and about and hanging out. Good conversation is good for the soul. Getting off my phone, out my head, out of the apartment, even away from my book, and being in the city with its clangs and smells and lines and heat, sharing food and space with new and old friends, gauging their spice tolerance, laughing together, regaling them with horror stories of dates gone bad is just—yes—good for the soul.

After dinner, someone suggests frozen yogurt at Culture, and everyone is down. And another thing about me: I love women who eat. Women who get the apps, get the salad, get the mains, and get the dessert. We get it all. At Culture, the line is appropriately long. As we wait, we discuss froyo fascism. What happened to dispensing your own froyo? To choosing your own toppings? Now you have to wait forty-five minutes in line just to watch someone skimp on the oreo crumble. And forget about samples.

A little while later, J’s partner joins us. The conversation shifts to high school physics and parenting in Brooklyn. Later, as we are walking to catch the G back home, he points at a bright spot in the sky. “That’s Jupiter,” he explains. And we all look.

saturday

I start Saturday feeling much the same way as any other day this week: like a corpse with a headache. Once again I contemplate why I continue to eat my way through New York like it is my full time job. Maybe today I will stay in, and reflect a little on the direction my life is heading in. Maybe I will unload the dishwasher for once, do my alarming pile of laundry, and just…take a beat. T, K, and I have brunch plans at Le Crocodile. I think of a croque monsieur and feel nauseous. “I’m going to be honest,” I text T, “But I need to ‘listen to my body’ today and pass on brunch”. “Would you do a walk?” she asks. “yes!!!” I text back immediately.

The three of us walk to Bushwick and browse a vintage clothing store in which a stained white t-shirt that says HAWAII is on sale for $35. Then we walk some more and talk about life, sports, horses, and socialism. Occasionally, I dip out of the conversation, and unmute myself to chime in to a four-way phone call between my sisters and I. Fifty minutes later, I have an appetite, and we have a destination: La Cantine, a reliably excellent “french” cafe/diner/restaurant. I don’t really think it’s french even though it says so on Google, but it doesn’t matter that it’s not french, because what it is, is very good. After several expensive misses in a row, all of us want to eat a meal that felt worth it. “That’s valid,” I say to my mother and sister as I scan the menu. We sit down to a perfect sweet-savoury breakfast in the weak sunshine. To eat we have: eggs over medium, a perfectly ripe avocado, crispy and fluffy potatoes, a slice of crunchy almond cake, a salty chocolate chip cookie, and a baguette with butter and raspberry-strawberry jam, with a black americano to wash it all down. I don’t think breakfast needs to be anything other than this — mostly savoury, a little sweet, and enjoyed in the sun with your friends.

We continue walking. It felt imperative that we keep walking, partly out of obligation to the weather, and partly in penance for our days-long gluttony. Once the joy of eating something wears off, I am left to contend with: a bloated body, a salty feel in my mouth, a dehydrated face, a spinning head, and bodily exhaustion. This is the price I have to pay, at nearly thirty years old, for the pleasure of a slice of cake, a plate of steak frites, a scoop of ice cream. And on that post-La Cantine walk, sipping a sour green juice (lemon, ginger, kale, dandelion greens, spinach, cayenne) and tallying the various parts of my body that ached and pulled, I was paying it, willing my half-hearted body to feel whole again. We walk in and out of the sunshine, under small canopies of blossoming trees and skirt around trash cans. I feel a rush of affection for my roommates. I am glad that I didn’t stay in. I wave goodbye to them, and hop on the subway to meet Y in the lower east side.

Y was in Manhattan to celebrate the launch of a bag her friend had designed. When we meet up at the East Broadway station, she looks exactly like someone invited to a fashion event in Soho: elegantly dressed in black, silver jewelry on her arms, neck, and ears. I look like I just rolled out of bed because well, I had. My face is unwashed, hair still in the braids I’d slept in, and I am wearing the first thing I’d seen when I got dressed. At some point earlier in the day, I’d resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t returning home for the rest of the day. We walk through the Lower East Side and through the winding Chinatown streets discussing this bag (selling for $600!), the books we’re reading, the men we’re seeing and if their oddities were endearing or toxic. Years ago, when I was 21 and living in Brooklyn, she and I had walked around somewhere in these Chinatown streets for the first time together, after messaging each other on the internet. I imagine an invisible string stretching out from the dim sum we got that summer of 2018, through years of staying in touch, then not, then reconnecting, and eventually unspooling into this park, ending at the steamed yolk bun she just bought for me. “So do you love him?” she asks me. I take a bite.

After Y and I split up, I circle back to East Broadway to meet up with F who I’d run into while walking with Y. “Imagine the odds of us running into each other in Manhattan!” I’d said excitedly to her. F had looked at me with pity. “This is Dimes Square on a Saturday,” she’d said. “Literally everyone is here”. F wants to buy a top for a photoshoot next week, and I want to do anything that keeps me walking. We dive back into SoHo and browse a few stores. The experience of in person shopping seems to deteriorate by the day, it’s a frenetic blur of fluorescent lighting and radio music, and somehow the one thing you want is out of stock. At one store, I ask a store associate what their return exchange policy is. She looks at me like I’m the first person that year to ask her this question. Kim Kardashian was right. No one wants to work anymore. I certainly don’t! An hour later, F admits defeat, and heads back to Brooklyn.

I continue walking. Twilight is settling in, and the energy of the city is shifting. Cafes and bakeries and stores are closing, and patios are opening up. A wave of people is spilling out into the streets for drinks and dinner and dessert and dancing. For the first time that day, I have no one to talk to, so I settle for listening to snatches of conversation about how the line for Culture would be (at least thirty minutes), and when the next A train was (three minutes) and one particularly vicious debate over a chess game. The subway rumbles beneath my feet. A boom box blares in the distance. My phone rings, but I don’t answer it. I walk home alone.

monday

If I can, I always begin the week with a pilates class. Specifically, reformer pilates. The thing is, I kind of think reformer pilates is a scam. But much like eye cream, wisdom tooth extraction, premium economy seats, and “free shipping”, it is a scam I willingly participate in. Reformer pilates is performed on a mechanical machine that has a seat on wheels, and a set of straps and springs to add tension and weight to exercises. It is an absolute myth that it “sculpts” or “tones” your body, and I am always a little embarrassed that’s how it is marketed to women. And yet I find the workouts incredibly satisfying. A good class leaves me feeling loose and supple, but also strong and awake. It flexes my shoulder blades, the arches of my feet, the small of my back, and my pelvis. It wrings me out like a dish towel, and I don’t care that it costs me $34 an hour.

As I pedal my feet, I think ruefully of the spicy khao soi and empanadas and wedge salads I’d split with friends over the past week. I promise myself that I will eat raw vegetables today. Hot water with chia seeds. Poached chicken breast. Truth is, I don’t even regret the food, but I can’t shake the feeling that I have come to New York to run away. To throw away a career and then attempt to find happiness in a shared bowl of khao soi. Monday morning, and I have nothing to do except hold an ab curl. I roll my eyes. Maybe I should let that bowl of khao soi be what it is: a bowl of khao soi. Maybe I should just get out of my own way. I switch to a side plank. When the instructor tells me I am doing it wrong, I immediately apologize. “Don’t apologize!” she says. “You’re doing your best”!