I Love New York

New York City Jennifer on Thanksgiving Day, wearing all black and nestled among strangers on the F train.

I moved to New York City on April 17, 2004 with my soon-to-be-ex husband. For many months prior to the move, we lived with his parents in rural Kentucky while we saved up enough money to move. We sold one of our cars, put together as much money as we could (which wasn’t much), packed up a Uhaul and a car with our belongings and our cat, and drove from Kentucky to New York. Four friends met us at our new apartment and helped us move in. Those four friends represented about 70% of the people I knew in NYC on April 17, 2004. My husband and I had no jobs, no prospects, and enough money to survive for about a month.

A month later I was offered a full-time job working for one of Martha Stewart’s magazines. Four months later our car was stolen. Four years later I left my husband. And now six years later I sit in an apartment in Brooklyn and attempt to pack up all of my material possessions so that they will fit in a 5 x 10 storage unit on Flatbush Avenue this Saturday afternoon.

I took a 9am flight from Raleigh to New York City on Monday morning, and when I walked out of LaGuardia I inhaled the putrid glory of a NYC early summer morning and welcomed myself home. I paid a car service an obscene amount of money to drive me to my apartment in Brooklyn, and then walked into my apartment for the first time in about two months. The first 24 hours back felt like I was in an uncomfortable dream. I missed my father terribly, and called my mother every few hours for an update on his condition. He was in rough shape Monday night, and there was talk of having to take him back to the ICU. I considered ditching my “Week In New York” plan and hopping on a plane back to NC, but I decided I needed to give myself this week. I owe it to myself. I owe it to New York City. We have to say a proper goodbye.

And now I feel the tears coming. And I feel that sensation I get in the back of my throat right before I cry. New York City is my home. She is a relationship in my life. She called me here years ago, and I answered her call. I have always trusted her, and she has always taken care of me. When I arrived, I knew almost no one and had only a vague idea of what I wanted to do with my life; she has gifted me a family of friends and has helped me discover who I am and what I want to do. In many ways, the last six years feel like a blur. They were at times very difficult and very painful. Growth is painful. But just as my father used to rub bourbon on my swollen gums when I was teething, New York City finds ways to assuage the pain. And those ways can be just as addictive as the Jack Daniels of my youth.

There’s an electric energy here. It gets into your bloodstream and you start to crave it like crack. There is a certain brotherhood among young people crazy enough to come here. My circle of NYC friends is mostly comprised of creative, artistic, unique individuals with little money. Most of us were not born and raised here but rather answered New York City’s call sometime in our 20s. We band together and support each other, and the circle grows bigger and bigger every year. It’s a thing of beauty.

I forget what New York City means to the rest of the world. I forget what an oddity I am to most people in the South. I can’t tell you how many times over the course of the last two months I have had a conversation with one of my father’s nurses that went a little something like this:

Nurse (usually with a Southern accent): “Do you live here in Durham?”

Me: “No. I live in New York.”

[Nurse shoots me a look of either disgust, confusion, envy or awe.]

Nurse: “Wow. Why do you live there?”

Me: “Because I love it.”

[Nurse shoots me another look of either disgust, confusion, envy or awe.]

At this point in the conversation, the nurse will usually tell me about her experiences of visiting NYC at some point in her life and seeing the Statue of Liberty or some Broadway play. Sometimes she’ll ask me if I’m scared to live there. “Oh, it’s so scary,” she’ll say.

One of my favorite nurses in the ICU was Lisa, the charge nurse. Lisa has been a nurse for more than 30 years and is one of the most phenomenal nurses I’ve ever encountered. We got to know each other during my father’s 47-day stay in the ICU, and one day we started talking about New York. Lisa told me that she lived on the Upper West Side in her 20s. She told me stories about the job she worked, the life she had, the things she did. Every time she talked to me about her days in New York, her face looked about ten years younger. She was lighter and happier. It was as if she was telling me about a former lover…The One Who Got Away. When I asked her why she left, her face got heavier and older and she said something about husband/marriage/job/family. She came down to North Carolina and never went back. It was a brief, beautiful time in her life, and occasionally she would relive it with me as I sat in a chair next to my father’s bed and she changed his IV bag.

Friends, I fly to North Carolina on Monday morning and I do not know when I will return. This scares me, but this also excites me. I have no idea what the future holds. I don’t know how long this saga with my father is going to last, I don’t know how it’s going to end, and I don’t know who I will be at its conclusion. This summer I am going to stay with my dad’s cousin Gail; she is retired, lives in Durham, has an extra room in her home, and is cool as hell. I never really knew her before this tragedy began, but now I can see that there are some aspects of being a Blevins that must pass through the DNA. I think we’ll get along just fine.

Other than that, I will be a nomad. I shall be the North Carolina Nomad. I will visit friends in North and South Carolina who I haven’t seen in years, I will visit cities in the South that I miss or have never seen before, and I will let the future reveal itself to me. It is my sincere hope that life brings me back to New York City. But I believe in surrendering to the natural life/death/rebirth cycle. Most people in our society are not comfortable with this cycle. Culturally speaking, I think we tend to hold on to things long after we should have let them go. Relationships, jobs, beliefs, homes, material possessions, plans…the list is endless. It’s part of the reason why we are so bad at dealing with death. Death happens. Skin must be shed. I think that sometimes the pain or sadness or depression we feel in our lives is a result of holding on to something that no longer serves us. It is the friction we feel when we are too afraid, for whatever reason, to let something go. I loved my husband, but I knew it was best for me to let him go. I love New York City, but if I must I will let her go. I love my father, but if I must I will let him go.

But before I go, I would like to address every individual I have met in the last six years in New York City:

Thank you. And the next time you see that crazy violin player in the Union Square subway station who wears the black spandex pants and dances around like he’s the fucking Lord of the Dance, please mock him for me.

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Tags: getting out of NYC, North Carolina

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