i’ve been living in brooklyn for just about three months now. my apartment, while adorable, is still completely unfinished. we have no coffee table, there are 7 cardboard boxes in the living room alone (all mine, all in various states of unpack), much of the furniture/decoration/kitchen utensils belong to my former roommate, who is as anxious to pick them up as i am to spend money on their replacements, and the only thing adorning my walls are remnants of tape and sticky tack from the previous inhabitant.
across the street from my apartment is a restaurant (i’m being generous). it’s poorly lit, with tables, chairs, walls and a counter all made of a sort of murky brown color, which sounds sort of charming and antique-y, but it isn’t. it reminds me of the kind of place you would stop at on a family road trip when you were famished and mom adamantly refused to set foot in another mcdonald’s or friendly’s. you’d walk in, look nervously around at the vaguely dingy decor and wonder if you’d “discovered” a local gem or committed yourself to a few hours of heartburn at best or literally gut-wrenching food poisoning at worse.
i’ve never seen anyone under 50 in this place, and the clientele is largely older men who are slightly overweight and wear t-shirts and/or flannel and baseball caps. the coffee is a little watery, but it is 75 cents a cup, and it’s similarly watery at both the diner and the convenience store, and the diner’s costs $1.25 (calm down, starbucks) and the convenience store is just kind of cruddy and the guy behind the counter doesn’t smile. so the place across the street has become my default. and this morning, i walked in to find my paper cup of coffee (with a napkin placed delicately over its lid) sitting on the counter waiting for me. the thin, brunette behind the counter who looks like a no-nonsense jew who’s been telling too-friendly male customers how it is for the last 20 years, takes my dollar bill and tells me to “have a good day, hon” as she hands me my change.
this feels like a victory. this hardened restaurant owner doesn’t want to chat about the craptastic weather or tell me about how her geriatric dog peed on the floor this morning, but she has willingly accepted me as a part of her morning routine.
growing up i didn’t really give a shit about new york until i went to england with my family in sixth grade and people were impressed that i lived next to new york. granted, these “people” were other sixth graders, but i nonetheless felt like a celebrity and couldn’t help but feel indebted to new york for sharing some of its enigma and popularity with an awkward sixth grader with a bad case of acne.
freshman year of high school, my friend t and i were pretty intent on being rebellious, so we used to sneak into new york on saturdays without telling our parents. we had absolutely no idea what to do in new york, much less where anything was, but we were perfectly content to walk around aimlessly, announcing familiar landmarks we had seen on field trips or on outings with our parents as though we had been there, doing very cool and adult things, countless times before (“oh, this is times square. it’s really touristy.”). we also spent some of this wandering time awkwardly hanging out with someone whom i can only describe as my online boyfriend, who had been kicked out of the boarding school we attended a year before we arrived (we were “introduced” by a mutual friend).
throughout high school, through field trips and family excursions or special occasions with friends, new york became slightly more familiar but no more accessible — it was exciting and dynamic and fun, but it belonged to other people — both the unreachable, aloof new yorkers and my own family and friends who either lived there or spent a great deal of time there.
in college, the city was a 2 hour train ride away, and again reserved for special excursions, in which i continued to feign an intimacy i did not feel (“i LOVE soho”) for the benefit of my friends who grew up in new england, the midwest or california. if i was from new jersey, i had to have something to show for it other than a general disregard for the volume of my voice.
when i moved back to new jersey for a year after college, new york became my dream city/lifestyle. i would spend every weekend i could afford there, lugging my duffel bag between friends’ apartments, fantasizing about the freedom that would come when i finally found a job and an apartment of my own there. the city seemed so full of THINGS — things to do, things to eat, things to buy, things to look at, things to make drunken mistakes with, etc.
it’s exciting to discover that the city seems no less full of possibility now that i’ve been here for three months. in fact, i feel like that time has served to show me exactly how little i know about the city, which i guess is just another way of saying how much there is left to discover. it’s a little daunting, but it’s mostly exciting.
i still spend at least 5 minutes of my 45 minute/3 train daily commute trying to figure out (1) where on the platform i should be standing at each stop and (2) which side of the subway car the door will open on. god help me, i will have this down eventually. i still haven’t explored at least two-thirds of the streets within a square mile of my apartment, still haven’t found my default drunk pizza place or high chinese food place, still have no idea what is going on anywhere below houston street, have no conception of when subways become local/express/make up routes of their own, still get on the wrong subway or walk the wrong direction and feel compelled to look like i’ve forgotten something when i turn around and go the other way just in case anyone cares or is watching.
but my 75 cent coffee was waiting for me this morning, so i still feel pretty good about the whole thing.
