friday love list #7: a love letter to nyc
but not the one you think
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Friday is Venus’s day. A day for connection, for beauty, for joy. For sharing what is bringing us joy, and what we’ve loved.
As ever, the Friday Love List is in honor of and offering to Venus. Here are some of the things that most brought me pleasure and delight this week.
The week of my dear friends
and Nina St. Pierre’s book launches was very, very busy, and after their respective launches (and parties) I ended up reflecting quite a bit on my shifting relationship to my body and to the city itself. In editing the reflection for the Friday series, it has grown and shape-shifted into something a bit larger — as anything to do with New York so often does.A love letter, of sorts, to New York City
It was never my dream to live in New York. The first time I visited, with my ex-husband, we were here for barely 72 hours and I was desperate to leave by the end, I was so energetically overwhelmed. Every visit I took here with friends built my tolerance, but it felt like I always left the city with an emotional hangover, eager to return to the pastoral shores of the Charles River in Boston.
And so it surprised everyone in my life when I moved to New York rather impulsively with a now-ex partner. We both had been in Boston for years, and we were desperate for change: in our careers, in the rhythm of daily life, and also in our relationship. Moving, maybe, would fix it; our move date — January 1st — even felt symbolic. New year, new city, new us.
The move (obviously) didn’t fix the problems in our relationship. The pressure of the city only further exposed and deepened the cracks. As New York is wont to do, I’ve learned. Pressure can destroy a fragile thing. Pressure can also form a diamond.
About a year and a half, one dog, and two apartments into our time in New York, I ended that relationship, one that had begun within six months of my divorce from my ex-husband being official. I’d spent most of my twenties in deeply committed, monogamous partnerships, and I was ready to have fun. Simultaneously, I was slowly building a freelance writing career and starting to work more devotedly on my memoir. When you’re not putting all your creative energy into a relationship that isn’t working, you actually have creative energy for the work itself.
If you want to revel in being single, with all its incumbent freedoms, New York is a great city to be in. There is, truly, a different thing to explore every night of the week. Newly unattached, with absolutely no intentions of locking myself down again, I ended up going out almost every night — a pace I would maintain for years. Mind, I wasn’t a club kid. Bars had long been my venue of choice. Clubs felt like a sensory overload; bars — especially dive bars — were cozy and contained.
It felt like I practically lived at Cubbyhole, a narrow hallway of a dive in the West Village that was my favorite lesbian bar in the city. On weekdays, I’d leave my office in Chelsea and head down 6th Avenue to hit Cubby for a quick Corona before whatever dinner with friends I was having that night, knowing we’d probably end up at Cubby after dinner, too. On weekends, I would go up to write at the Met Cloisters during the day, and then end up downtown in the East or West Village as the halfway meeting spot for dinner with Brooklyn friends, and then head back out to Cubby or, occasionally, Stonewall or Henrietta’s. Those were my hooking up with women in bars years, my tweeting-about-an-anonymous-flirtation-and-that-person-finding-my-Twitter-and-getting-weird years, the bouncer letting me into Cubby even when the line was around the block years. Also, the horrible summer where I had profoundly embarrassing drunken crying-screaming temper tantrums in Cubby trying to confront the woman for whom, it turned out, I was the “other” woman.
It was, often, less than idyllic. I was, often, very lonely, and desperately trying to figure out who I was becoming. But sitting outside of Cubby, smoking Marlboros with strangers who were new friends, I was spotlit under the moon and the hazy street lamps, my legs stretched out on the cobblestone streets of a historically gay neighborhood in the city, and, well. That went a long way to easing the things I was working out for myself. The way that my everyday experience was woven amongst iconic queer institutions in the city — sometimes, looking back, I know just how easy it would be to romanticize in a memoir. Sometimes, it doesn’t feel like my life, but like a belated coming-of-age queer movie.
I am grateful — endlessly grateful — for that time in my life, and for the deeply kind and supportive friends who I went out with so often, who made it so joyful (especially my former coworker-and-still-sister-friend Bailey and my then-roommate Abby, who was a Cubby regular long before I was and who introduced me to the old crowd). But I am, simultaneously, aware that the ends of such High Intensity periods are when a lot of people get disenchanted: with nightlife, with the City, and ultimately, perhaps, with themselves.
When I wasn’t looking, or perhaps just because of the pandemic and its incumbent influences, or perhaps because of finding more financial stability and being able to actually afford a home that I loved and wanted to spend time in, I turned in my bar fly punch card and became a homebody.
The end of my going out years was precipitated by my beginning to work remotely full-time, in 2019, before the pandemic. I was already realizing that the pressure of my work, the sheer intensity of daily life, being a spiritually aware person packed shoulder-to-shoulder in a subway car with a hundred other people on my daily commute — it was not sustainable for me. I was, often, physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. It is also no accident that those were my early years of studying astrology more seriously, and beginning to incorporate it in my life. That increasing daily awareness of the cosmos brought me into a deeper awareness and relationship with my own body and psyche, and what I needed. In order to stay in the city that I loved, I needed to change my lifestyle.
It forced me to drill down to the root of myself, to decide who I wanted to be and what kinds of changes I would need to make in my life to get there. New York runs at such a fast pace, and such a high intensity, that letting up on the gas or changing direction can risk feeling like failure — because, conventional wisdom goes, why are you here if not to live in the eye of the storm? The loudest critics of how New York “is over” are, more often not, other transplants who are looking to extract what they can from the city. When they’ve done that — or are too tired to do it anymore — they then say the city isn’t what they thought it would be.
But I understood the city to be a part of that journey that I both co-created with and also reacted to. New York is its own living organism, fluid and always in motion: you either change with it and through it, or resist and get chewed up in the process. The thing is, New York doesn’t change you into another person. It will change you — but what it really does, if you stay long enough, is strip you down to the bone to reveal who you are. (It’s why native New Yorkers — people who were born and raised here — are just a different kind of human.) This is an extreme environment — physically, emotionally, spiritually — in a way other cities I have lived in simply are not. This is not a diss. I love the diversity of American cities — I’ve lived in Minneapolis and Boston, spent an inordinately large amount of time in Chicago and Houston, and absolutely adore Los Angeles. But New York is a different beast. Eight and a half million people live in 300ish square miles — or, broken down, 27,000 people per square mile. The density (with walkability and accessible public transit meaning all those people are actually out in the city interacting, not cooped up in cars) invites a unique kind of intensity.
This is all to say. I love New York for how she is a crucible. I love how Saturnian she is, how demanding of rigor and attention. I love her variety and her pleasure-filled offerings. I love the historical institutions she holds so dear. I love walking on the Hudson River up in Harlem where no tourists are around. I love the fairy tale-like wonder of the North Woods of Central Park and the vastness of Fort Tryon.
And I have especially grown to love her quiet corners: the ones she reveals over time, when life is not “bright lights, big city” but, rather, has found a stillness. I’ve found, in this life transition to a quieter, slower pace, that corners of the city I did not know about — or have access to — have now opened up to me. I live in one such quieter neighborhood now, which is still plenty busy, but which is full of people who just live here.
I’m not a regular at a bar anymore, but my local bookshop’s booksellers all know me and my partner Meg.
This is the kind of transition point at which a lot of people leave the city. “Well, we’re slowing down, or getting married and having kids — time to go.” And listen, I’m not going to judge that or pretend that Meg and I might not leave someday; the likelihood of us getting priced out is increasingly high. This year, we’ve been spending well over 50% of our monthly income on rent. That isn’t sustainable.
But the belief that the city is only hustle and bustle, that it’s only going out and networking and hooking up, that it’s only worth it to live here if you’re going to go to fancy restaurants and shows every night, misses the whole point of living in a place.
Which is community. Which is tending the garden that is your local ecosystem.
Homebodyness is part of why Meg and I moved to our current neighborhood, where we are within 10 minutes walking distance of our entire D&D group and several other very close friends. “The heart of friendship,” one friend calls it, since if you trace all of our houses on a map, it makes a heart. I haven’t lived this close to so many close friends since I was in college. When I tell other people about our proximity to our beloveds, no matter who they are or what they do, they groan. “The dream!” everyone says. Because it is the dream.
The dream that New York is making possible, at this point in my life, isn’t an Energizer Bunny pack to have me going out all the time — it’s rootedness in my home, in my relationship, in the friendships I am able to so mindfully tend.
The dream is having a “heart of friendship.” The dream is celebrating your friends’ big exciting life moments, like a book launch, and then going home to a place that is truly Yours, and resuming a life that you worked so hard to build — and one that you dearly love.
This is all to say. I love New York, in all her iterations, and in all the aspects of myself that she has revealed to me over time. It is a beautiful thing, to grow and change in a place you never thought you’d live, that you never thought you’d love.
A few more things I’m loving
Writers who also love tarot! The wonderful
has a new book out, WRITING THROUGH FEAR: A STORY ARCANA GUIDE, that addresses how different creative fears connect to the Major Arcana and how to work with them. So good!TTRPG nerds who live in or are visiting NYC! Meg and I went to the now D&D official Twenty-Sided Tavern, which is showing Off Broadway, and were absolutely delighted and awed by the live game production they pulled off. It was so fun. I will definitely go again (because odds are high it’ll be a different show!).
What are you loving this week, now that Venus is in Gemini? Get in the comments!
This year, I’ve lived in NYC for twenty five years, and 20 in my current neighborhood (Astoria). This is a beautiful and true piece ❤️ I love essays that talk about how wonderful and special the city is these days, as people so often love to shit on it.
NYC will always be the city of my deepest self and heart! Thanks for this.