On Leaving
Had I been braver I would have stayed. For what reason I don’t know — to clash my pans out of the window at 7pm and join the West Village crowd pausing daily walks to stare up at the shuttered Stonewall and say, “I, like, just can’t believe this is happening?” I could have taken great photographs of empty streets. I could have taken average photographs of empty streets. I could have snuck out of the house to avoid the judgement of my roommates and caught the 6 train to Grand Central and give my blood, having been at a loss of what else to give.
Because money was out of the question. A pay-cut piled on top of an apartment I already couldn’t really afford would have ruined me. I would have gone into debt, and anyway, what is the city but a place to spend money? The New York I knew disappeared when they shut the bars and the street food vendors drove away. If I closed my ears to the sirens so obnoxiously New York I could be in Tbilisi or Silverlake or Johannesburg.
Had I stayed I would have gone bankrupt, I told my friends. I have no choice, I told myself.
But I really could have done it. It would have been hard, but I could have done it, poor and frustrated and maybe a bit lonely. I imagine my parallel self, the one who didn’t hysterically refresh flights out of JFK hour by hour, in the darkest corner of the hardest of cities. I would suffocate for want of an outdoor space — Christ, a rooftop would do — and grow tough from the barrage of bad news and strangers’ anger. I would retreat into a pit of resentment and Netflix until the soot cleared and there I’d be: a diamond cut from hardship I’d never known until then. Someone with a real story to tell. Someone who stuck by their so-called love for a place. Someone who was braver.
The reality was that I bounced and lived a pandemic that was safe and easy and good to me. I think my good luck all began when I caught that last sunset over Manhattan from outside of Terminal 4. And then when I caught that near-empty, supposedly dry flight out to Heathrow, where a marvelous man on the cabin crew uncovered a prohibited miniature of merlot out back. I returned to a house of love where I was healthy, and some summer evenings I glowed a little from a day walking in the countryside sun, marveling at my own good fortune but never doing anything real with it. My life was free from concrete and mezcal and grease and sex; I felt a little like a troubled 1930s socialite whisked away for severe pampering in Switzerland.
Things could not have been better were it not for the feeling I’d abandoned an ancient and complicated but wonderful friend in her time of need. I’d left her with the boring and indifferent: those masked joggers of the East Side highway who never stopped to marvel at the ground they pounded and those that leapt over the river to Jersey the minute they could. And me, sometimes I would stand on my doorway like Henry Hill at the very end of Goodfellas, looking out upon suburbia like an average nobody, a schnook.
Every so often I stoke that guilt inside. It warms me very slowly — degree by degree — and readies the diamond for cutting.
