Deserting the Empire

An incurable case of wanderlust takes a born-and-bred Brooklynite from Wisconsin to California to Scandinavia. Along the way, she learns the world isn’t quite sure what to do with a New Yorker who decides not to be one. 

by Celeste Ramos

“Where are you from again?”

I’m having lunch with a new client and his staff in a swank neighborhood on the west side of Oslo, Norway. I know exactly where this conversation is headed the minute I respond.

“Brooklyn.”

The brows jump, the smiles grow; ‘the foreigner’ has immediately piqued their interest. One person was “just there!” while another goes once a year to “get away from it all,” whatever that means.

The conversation will then go like this: the people who have never been to New York will ask me what it’s like. These Gotham Virgins will then join the seasoned travelers among us in asking how the hell I could have left a place like New York City. When I justify my existence and reason for leaving, they’ll immediately ask me if I’ll ever go back.

By the power of Miss Cleo, my prediction comes true.

Eyes wide with interest, one of the crew asks, “What’s it like?”

I love this question because it conjures up so many odd things that people associate with New York City and her natives. I went to college in Wisconsin from 2000 to 2004, partly as an experiment, partly out of having fallen in love with the Midwestern farm country and incredibly cheap food. I will never forget the first day of freshman year, when I introduced myself to my classmates. Afterward, a girl from small town Iowa came up to me and said, “You’re from New York! Wow! Is it true people never sleep there?”

She was dead serious.

That’s when it first hit me: I was from a place that is actually mythical to some people. There’s a very ‘anti-bubble bubble syndrome’ that happens when you grow up in a city like New York. I grew up thinking it was all pretty normal. I knew New York was famous, but then again the States seemed full of famous cities. What was the big whoop? And there I was thinking that being from hood-era Bushwick, Brooklyn, was nothing special.

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