
One Month in New York
The last time I wrote something like this, it took a year. I needed a full year of life in Los Angeles to fully capture what I felt then — a slow and rich love for a place that fed into me like a steaming mug of chocolate at my oracle grandmother’s kitchen table. Rich and thick and laden with the spice of my ancestor’s lives reaching back into my mind and body in a soothing embrace.
I grew there, like the buganvilla vines climbing along the stuccoed walls and palm trees, reaching upward toward a sun that reigned on my brown skin like a crown. Maybe it was the ocean that told me I was part of something bigger than the short expanse of my life. Maybe it was the mountains that told me me to live for more. Maybe it was the sun that told me it to allow myself to unfurl. To be open. To be vulnerable. To be carefree.
And now, all at once, New York.
Where Los Angeles sanded away my ragged edges, New York calls them into focus — sharpening the good, the bad and the ugly into ultra definition.
It was maybe the third night I spent here, lungs struggling to breathe the watery air that rose into my loft in waves, that I first panicked. A box fan whirring in the window of the sweltering loft. Sweat seeped out of every pore on my tiny body. Damp baby hairs clung to my neck. Somewhere on the street a baby screamed. Its mother screamed in Spanish in return. Police sirens wailed through the night.
How could I pretend that I was not already in love? How could I pretend that this, this place, and myself in it, wasn’t inevitable? It was and is the panic of a love so acute that you may not be fully in control of what happens next.
New York is an assault, its true. But it is an assault that I am deeply familiar with. It is a mountain I have climbed before and will climb again, though I hope it has something new to teach me this time around. I have so many hopes for my time in this city, and while I’ve always struggled with accepting anything — love, success, kindness, you name it — I hope that the bits of Los Angeles that have seeped in through osmosis stay with me here.
That I allow myself the space to be soft.
That I be decent and kind.
That I take care of myself and the people I love.
That I keep chipping away at the traumas that have calcified over my heart and not retreat back into them like an abused dog on its back haunches.
I want so badly for this to go well, but if I’ve learned anything in the tumult of of my life it’s that there’s too much at risk when we want things very badly. The pressure is both real and imagined, both from within and from without. It’s only been a month and so, perhaps, this reads more like a wishlist than a description of lived experience. And yet.
“You’ve wanted this for so long,” someone wrote to me recently. And like many things we’ve discussed over the years, they’re absolutely right.
