When I Returned to my Home in New York City Mid-Pandemic, I Realized I Had Become a Visitor
The city had moved on, and so had I
It had been a decade since I lived in my first New York apartment when I walked by and spotted the PSYCHIC sign in my former bedroom window.
I was eight months pregnant and late to my birthing class a few blocks away, so I decided to return the next week. When I pressed the #2 buzzer, I was let in right away and my early 20s came rushing back: my loneliness as I tried to find my footing and friends, my exhilaration as I fell in love with the city and a new guy every other week, my exhaustion after a day in four-inch heels as I tried to fake my way to fashionable while working at women’s magazines. Hauling my big belly up the dingy stairway felt surprisingly similar to scaling it in stilettos all those years ago.
I’d never visited a psychic before, and half-expected her to greet me with a gasp, intuiting immediately that I was the apartment’s former tenant. But Tessa simply invited me in and handed me a menu of services. I picked the cheapest option and began to peek around.
She’d knocked down the temporary wall my roommate and I had put up to transform the 300-square-foot space from one bedroom to two, and in place of our furniture foraged from the street and Craigslist, she’d installed white pleather couches. But the walls were still the pockmarked mess I remembered, and the bathroom the safari green I’d painted it to cheer myself up while job-hunting. The vibe was warehouse meets cheesy club, like an ironic party you might attend in Bushwick. But there was nothing ironic about Tessa.
As she took my hands, she closed her eyes and began issuing the kinds of platitudes that might pass for clairvoyance given their universality: “You’ll soon be welcoming great joy into your life.” Well, sure, anyone could see I was about to pop. “Someone close to you is unwell.” I ran through a mental catalog of my loved ones and realized with deep gratitude that actually, as far as I knew, they were all healthy.
When I pressed the #2 buzzer, I was let in right away and my early 20s came rushing back.
Tessa continued in this manner until I couldn’t help but blurt out, “I lived here.” She dropped my hands — and the act — then we collectively cataloged the apartment’s pros and cons: those cardboard-like doors, but also the roof access where I’d laid out on so many summer afternoons, hungover and baking in the sun, feeling like there was nowhere else I’d rather be. I had to ask Tessa the rent and was half-horrified, half-gleeful to discover it was double what I’d forked over each month.
When I left, off to learn about the three stages of labor, it felt like a farewell tour to my younger self — single, childless, earning a pittance that barely covered that rent. The apartment had been a shithole, and it still was, but it had also been home.
I had a similarly strange experience revisiting my second New York apartment, an East Village hovel that was a marginal upgrade from my previous digs. The best part was my superintendent, Kalif, who ran the bodega on the ground floor. I was still in a phase of rescuing furniture from the street (heck, I’m still in that phase now, given the right piece), and he’d once helped me haul a loveseat up four flights of stairs.
My then-boyfriend Damian and I were back in the East Village for a show after having moved in together in Brooklyn, and I insisted on visiting Kalif. We walked in and Kalif did a double-take, staring back and forth between Damian and me — he knew us both. Turns out, the year before I’d moved in, Damian had been living around the corner, and this had been his bodega too. We hadn’t put it together before this moment. It was like we were re-meeting across time, with Kalif our artful matchmaker. Kalif gave us his blessing, and we went on our way, down to the F train through the tunnel back home.
Our first apartment together was a disaster in a dozen ways. Our landlords lived below us and were frequent proselytizers of their fundamentalist faith. We were chastised for every infraction but our rent was well below market, so it was still a blow when the building sold and we were evicted with a couple of weeks’ notice just as the storm of the century approached the city. Miraculously, we found a new spot two days after Hurricane Sandy hit.
Still, I mourned the loss of our first home together, and when I walked by one day and discovered it was a construction site, some management company gutting the place, I myself felt gutted. I missed all the “Jesus loves you” bumper stickers on the front door.
Our lives changed a lot in that next apartment. We got married, had a kid, switched careers — I got my first book deal. We lived there for nearly eight years and decided to leave with 18 hours’ notice on March 14, 2020, along with seemingly half the city. We rented the last available car out of JFK and fled to my parents’ house on Cape Cod, bringing a few small bags, assuming we’d be back in a week or two — but we ended up staying. We went back to that apartment just once, months later, to pack it up and prepare for movers.
I mourned the loss of our first home together, and when I walked by one day and discovered it was a construction site, some management company gutting the place, I myself felt gutted.
I’m not hugely sentimental or big on goodbyes, but this was abrupt, even for me. So, a year later and newly vaccinated, Damian and I returned to Brooklyn for the weekend, renting an Airbnb that was much nicer than any place I could’ve afforded during my 15 years in New York. I walked by our old apartment every chance I got. I stood on the sidewalk, peering up at the third-floor windows that had led to our bedroom and to our daughter’s makeshift nursery.
I waited for a sign — if not one beckoning me in for a psychic reading or a surprising reunion with my super, then something else that would match the uncanny magic I’d always felt swirling around me as a resident here. Or maybe just someone to emerge from the building so I could announce that this used to be my home.
But nothing happened. No one came out.
A powerful wave of bittersweetness washed over me: I was a visitor here. This had been my home, and now it wasn’t. The city had moved on, and so had I. I said goodbye and walked on.
Lindsey Palmer is the author of four novels, including Pretty in Ink, If We Lived Here, Otherwise Engaged, and Reservations for Six (out May 10th). She is also a former features editor at Glamour, Redbook, and SELF, a former high school English teacher, and currently a senior editor at BrainPOP, an animated educational site for kids.
