Packing and preparing to head back up north, my head and heart are struggling to catch up. When I look through my notes, I am stunned at how much has happened during these past almost-nine months. I am not a good mover. I am not great with change. But I seem to reap enormous rewards from abiding the tempests it requires for safe passage, and G seems to be my seafaring captain, constantly pushing me outside of what is comfortable and thereby showing me how much greater my life can be.

To say moving to the city was an adjustment would be understating things. It’s not like we moved to another country, but in some ways it felt like it. In the beginning, simple things were a production like doing laundry (at the Laundromat, two blocks away, with a laundry card— fluff and fold was an option but obviously more expensive and things got lost) and getting groceries (take the car or make sure you can carry what you buy—bringing the roller bag was an option but you have to plan ahead). Both of these took the better part of half the day in the beginning. Things that used to take a few minutes.

In exchange, I found an unrivaled abundance of places to go and things to do, many of them free or low cost. (Getting a drink afterward could make up for it, however.) The subway is the ultimate democratizer, $3 one way no matter how far you’re going. Is there a better bargain in the country, besides walking? That might be the best part of all: the sheer liberty of being on foot much of the time. The pace and possibility that happens when you’re ambulatory allows for unrivaled discovery. And serendipity.

Everyone walks. And everyone, of course, has a cell phone. We hear so much about people looking at their phones as they walk up and down the streets and avenues. Tons of others are walking to their own soundtracks, oblivious of someone saying “excuse me” or “I’m sorry” or “help,” but—not that I wear my own earbuds—there’s something vaguely appealing to me about NYC to the backdrop of your own sound landscape. It’s kind of like living in a movie, and if it makes people more chill, so much the better. Here was my surprise in this arena: people talking on the phone, at full voice level (sometimes even projecting), walking down the street. Not only do they seem a bit loony, it’s not idle chit-chat we hear but dialogue full of lush intimate details, as if the rest of the world isn’t there. A wild clash of public versus private. Two favorites, (a woman) “Who am I talking about? Who do you THINK I’m talking about? Whoever the fuck you were texting in November.” And a man in a flirty voice: “You getting your summer body ready, baby?”

There is a blending of spirit and humanity, creativity and survival. Riding the subway one day a group of five young men got on carrying hand-held drums. They began to sing and play, the music bouncing off the walls. While it was acoustically terrific, it was easy to see they were making a number of the riders uncomfortable especially when they asked for a donation or a kind word at the end. When they disappeared at the next station stop, there was a palpable exhale, people shuffling to make more space in their absence, relieved of the implicit demand for attention or a dollar. Then a little girl’s voice broke through, “Why did they have to get off?” she asked her mother. A startlingly large number of people smiled.

With the exception of the blinding newness around the greater One World Trade Center area, the city is notable for its current level of decay and overwhelming need for improvements in fundamentals like subways, roads and tunnels. Yet many of the people themselves carry a hidden kindness not far from the surface. As seen on a trip uptown: when a lady from Iran was confused about how to get to Jamaica, she had no less than five people of varying ages and skin colors, helping her and offering advice—even offering to get her to her next stop.

I often had the sense that there is magnificence in sharing space like this; perhaps it is more true to our fundamental selves than houses with multiple bedrooms and bathrooms (and certainly washers and dryers) separated by fences with cars parked in garages that insulate us all from one another. The tension of living close together leads to a tacit understanding of the reaches of civil behavior. There are unwritten fundamentals that certainly get violated from time to time, but there is vastly more peaceful coexistence than not.

Out with the dog one afternoon I saw fire trucks responding to a building on Bergen St. I stopped to watch and was joined by an elderly lady wearing a hand-knitted beret who looked at me and said, “This is a such great place to live! The water flows just right here when it rains [pointing to the sizable gutters]. The white people just found out. I don’t mind white people—I’m from Barbados.” Pointing at the fire truck, she added, “Let me tell you this: be sure to wear your panties to bed. Once there was a fire right there [pointing a few buildings away] and the lady came out in the middle of the night naked as the day she was born. Also put a box of your most important things right by your bed.”

One late evening, I was walking down the Park Street subway stairs with an older woman using a cane very carefully. I offered to carry her bag, and she started talking, “I worked cleaning crew at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and we were a team, always keeping an eye on the patients. I would help and look after them, too. Now not a day goes by that someone isn’t helping me. Like you.”

No doubt tolerance is required to live in such proximity. Like the laundry and groceries, this took some adjusting. Above our apartment live three young men whose hours are all over the place. They take out their garbage and recycling after midnight and regularly walk the dog at 2 or 3AM. They would come in and out incessantly at times, and the dog would let us know, each time, particularly when her counterpart’s collar and paws alerted her. I resorted to a white-noise-maker and fan which made a huge difference. Suffice it to say, it had been no less than twenty years since the last time someone else’s comings and goings directly affected my sleep, night after night.

When your sleep is interrupted, your whole self can be affected. Likewise when you need to go to the bathroom. One of the oddest things I found was how difficult it could be to find a bathroom. It became a joke. I bought food a number of times just to get a code to be able to use the facilities. I was turned down by Starbucks, tons of retail stores, and most drug stores—where do their employees go to the bathroom? This is a city of millions of people walking around; you’d think finding a bathroom would be a bit simpler and more straightforward. Heaven forbid if you don’t speak English.

Disposing in general took on massive proportions, as I’ve already reflected before with regard to the basics of garbage and recycling. The apartment is near the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, so we were lucky to have a composting option. Every Wednesday we took our compost to a common location where we filled giant black bins with the coffee grounds of Crown Heights. Each time I did it, it made me laugh: walking orange peels to the subway. But happily, we didn’t have to put our biodegradables in the landfill. And some of those botanicals will thrive directly because of this truly community-serving endeavor. In so many ways it represents everything I observed here: people coming together, contributing toward long-term urban improvement, at no real cost, just effort. I wonder if it doesn’t look a little bit like enlightenment. Not expecting others to do for you, but rather, doing one small act, making the soil richer and the air a little bit more pure.

My time in New York seemed to lend itself to poetry, to fragments. The ultimate in attention diversion. The ego wakes up first. Cortisol levels adjust to a new normal. I found it hard to write cohesively, but I consumed so much material! Living here is like being at a major multinational university where, if you look carefully, you can find PhDs in every subject. Experts in fields abound. There is a dazzling, intoxicating level of superiority, specificity, access, and scale. You can study and learn forever without going back to school.

Having adored being a mom and raising a child, one of the things I also enjoyed about the city was how domestic life and children are not the mainstay. Streets in Brooklyn are dead at 10:30AM on a Sunday. It is the land of adulthood primarily, albeit predominantly youthful adulthood. Children and families are here, but this life is not about them. It’s about the pursuit of career and resource primarily. It is about self. For someone seeking her own reclamation, it was not a half bad place to be, and when G rejoined me, it became an amazing location to practice the dance of mutual autonomy and interdependence.

Leaving the city will be more difficult than arriving. This time we have to shrink back into a smaller world with smaller thinking. As one of my Jamaican neighbors said, “Massachusetts?! That’s another country! No night life!” I will miss the sights and the sounds, the endless ways to spend a day, the luxury I had to explore and discover both this great city and my self. I will miss the sense that every moment here is magical because it will never come close to repeating itself, and the many people with whom I had momentary yet deeply meaningful connections. I will miss saying I live in Brooklyn. I will miss the B train’s view of all the bridges. I will miss living near college friends and being able to get together spontaneously. I will miss the range of classes in whatever subject interested me, the caring people who taught them, and my amazing classmates from all over the world and all corners of the city seeking to uncover ways to bring more light into this world. I will miss public transportation, talking with taxi and Uber/Lyft/Juno drivers (again, from all over the world – the most recent of whom said, “you should just stay!”) and just being in this electric place.  I will miss restaurant delivery services, Whole Foods delivery and Amazon same-day shipping. (Yet I will also miss our local bodegas and pharmacy who always had what I needed and stayed open until midnight.) I will miss, “There is a Manhattan bound 4 train approaching the station.” I will miss being able to be in Manhattan in 20 minutes. I will miss being an hour from Princeton. I will miss the non-stop flights, even though I didn’t take any. I will miss the mind-blowing theatre and full restaurants, even if I wasn’t dining out myself.

(I will not miss the dog upstairs being taken for a walk at 2AM.)

Truly, I will miss it all. I love it here.

I do not want to go.

Photo above: taken from observation area, One World Trade Center – January 2018