Why New York No Longer Feels Like Home to Me
I'm one of the rare few born and 40 years raised, but home is a place I can't return to.
When I think of New York, of home, I see grey. Grey like the curled, thickened clouds that burst and sweep the trash-ridden streets clean. Grey like the coins moving swiftly under paper cups on a folding table on a corner where men’s mouths run like race cars. Five-card monty without the cards. Hey, little girl. I know you wanna play. Words men will repeat throughout your life, though the meaning will shift and the grey will recede to red, to blackout.
But there you go losing quarters until the quarters become dollars and all you’re left with is a token for the subway home. Grey like coins slammed down on bodega counters for week-old waxed bagels slathered in hot cheese and scrambled eggs. Give me the bacon, cover me in grease. Bacon egg and cheeeee, the Greek chorus. Gray like charcoal, like a landscape that re-arranges itself into a tableau of a child writhing in pain. It’s you, on the gray ground, broken, while the car that hit you hums.
Something is broken, a collarbone you’ll soon learn. Your mother falls out of the laundromat, all octaves. The shadow of her blankets you, shrouds all the light. Your bruises blossom while she threatens pain, broken bones, murder. People call the cops while the woman who hit you calls insurance companies. You look down at your hands and the bag of cheese doodles lies just beyond your reach. You stretch and stretch along the grey pavement, but it’s too far.
Your wants are forever beyond your reach. Your mother lunges and the crowd pulls her back and you wonder if everyone’s forgotten you’re the one lying on the ground.
You hit a child! How will this affect my deductible? I will find you and I will kill you. This lady don’t live here — look at her, she’s white. You got break through a brigade of cops to kill her. You think I’m afraid of cops? I know people. Italians. Well, I hope you know a country of them because you’re gonna need it to fuck with the cops where this lady lives. It was an accident — she was so fast, I didn’t see her. It was the other car, the one that cut me off, where’s that car? If she didn’t run so fast and if the car didn’t cut me off…
When I think of New York, of home, I feel cuts. That which is excised and what’s left behind. Photo albums of mangled people, limbs akimbo, origami faces. People cut out of the frame, out of our lives. My name, Felicia, cut to Lisa because it was easier for my mother’s new husband to pronounce. Even now, nearly forty-seven-years-old, my pop still calls me Lisa. A name carried down from man to man. Felicia only used in public, in anger, in formalities until my given name feels foreign to me. I oscillate between two names trying to figure out which fits.
The last time I speak with my mother, years before she died, she calls me Lisa, to which I respond — that’s not my name. You’re my mother, how could you not know my name? You gave it to me along with everything else I was forced to carry. And when she says my name, it feels awkward, forced, her lunging at it like she lunged at the woman whose car hit me and I fall to the ground and I hang up, wishing she didn’t say it at all.
I see cuts. The intensity in which I loved people and the fear of them leaving. How I could never reconcile love and loss being flip-sides of the same coin, so there I go, yelling them out of my life. Cruel cuts with words I knew would wound. Cut like the man I loved who poked at my chest and said, I tried so hard to get in there. Well, you got in everywhere else. Was I supposed to wrench my still-beating heart out of my chest and hand it over to you? Is that the deal we make when we love? How long will you hold on to the pulpy bits, the hot mess of me, all blood, sinew, and muscle until I collapse to the gray ground? The gray from which we’ve come. The gray we all crawl our way home to.
Cuts like the seventeen doors you count in the homes you’ve lived in and abandoned. Cuts like the ads in the Pennysaver for apartments, places in Long Island, in Manhattan, in Brooklyn you can make a home. Cuts like the tape wrapped around the brown boxes that will cart you from one place to the next until you realize home is merely a box where your mail is forwarded and boxes unpacked.
I see cuts. Calories halved and quartered and winnowed down until you subsist on Starbucks and Lean Cuisine, but everyone wolf-whistles and applauds your vanishing frame. You drink a bottle of red wine a day, run seven miles, and can’t remember the last time you finished a plate of food you keep dividing the meats and leaves into manageable portions, but your body is a thing everyone wants to celebrate. You keep cutting until you realize stores don’t sell sizes that are negative integers.
You’re so thin, everyone says always, and eyes you like you’re the meal worth devouring. Even though you spent a lifetime trimming the fat, all you’re left with is an emptiness, a bottomless chasm that could never be filled. And you think maybe if you gain the weight back you’ll recover your losses though it’s been so long you can’t recall what they are.
When I think of New York, of home, I hear everything. The city is a volume perpetually turned up. The sirens of the ambulances at the park you walk through on the way to school. The crinkle and slap of garbage bags the junk sick with eight-ball eyes and bodies burned blue are packed into. The screech of the taxi cab your mother’s first boyfriend used to drive and the men who pulled him out by his shirt and kicked and punched and pummeled him until his teeth left tracks on the street. Your mother watched from the window days after you hear him, see him, slam her head into a wooden table, a table she’ll move to three apartments. A table you’ll use until you leave for college.
I hear everything. Mumbling and shouting on the subway and the screech of the rails as the train enters 14th Street, 34th Street, 7th Avenue, 216th Street. The strum of guitars on the platform and the boys chorusing Showtime! in the cars. Even before everyone’s phone had become an appendage, you lived in a city where it was impossible for anyone to shut the fuck up.
I hear crack pipes shattering in alleyways, men unzipping their pants behind a Key Food dumpster in Long Island. Hey, little girl. I know you wanna play. The crack of eggshells on the counter as you tried to bake brownies not realizing you don’t bake with cooked eggs, only raw ones. I hear my mother spitting out the chocolate into the trash can and my pop’s laughter after he takes a second, third bite.
Sometimes, I still hear the two kittens my mother packed into a pillowcase and made my pop drive to a wooden green because they mewed too loud. Even now, after all this time, I still hear their soft mews and paws padding the cotton sheet. And I hate myself for not opening my mouth at twelve and forcing out a shout. Instead, I feel the cheap velvet of our brown couch and U2’s “With of Without You” on a record player, on repeat.
I hear the phone ring. In college, in my home in Brooklyn and her voice on the other line. I hear myself finally having the courage, the strength to shout. You wonder if everyone’s forgotten you were the child lying on the ground.
I hear office doors close and the shouts and cries within. One job to the next. Platinum credit cards and the hum of a computer screen. Planes shuddering in the sky and landing gear unfolding like the gift you never asked for or wanted. Phones always ringing. Emails always tumbling out. What you hear at work is the threat, the whisper of a tsunami.
You hear about the weddings, birthdays, and first births you missed. You hear about the life you could’ve had but no one asked you if that was the life you actually wanted. The worry in their voices because you’re inching toward your best-by date and have you considered children? Children and the mouth sounds they make? Children and their hands reaching out, always wanting and needing when no one ever filled my well of wants? Yeah, that’s going to be a problem. Children are problematic for me. Sharing a bed with one man for the rest of my life when I often want to be left alone? Yeah, that’s going to be a problem for me.
And then one night, you hear the click of your own front door. The man you brought home from a bar but refuses to leave. And before the room goes black and the man asks you if you want to play, you hear yourself say the word stop. You hear yourself say no. You feel the air cut out of your throat. You feel the loss of sound.
Weeks later, you see his face on LinkedIn. You see him look at your profile.
When I think of New York, of home, I taste light. I feel the shadow of the buildings and the hot sun on my face. I feel the warmth blooming across my back, painting it pink and red and light brown. I taste the heat of summer and thick humid air that seizes you. The brownstone apartment in which I live is encased in golden light. I wind brown boxes with tape and pack suitcases thick with paper-thin blouses. I eat oatmeal standing up. I trace the fur of my cat’s underbelly and scratch him behind his ears, under his chin, and behind his thighs until all his paws are outstretched and I’m laughing so hard I can taste the salt and light streaming down my face. I hear car horns outside and the familiar hum of a moving truck.
After a lifetime of grey, of noise, of all the history that filled two books and the recesses of a heart locked in a black box, I taste California. Los Angeles. A city I rode a Greyhound bus three days to when I was seventeen. A city I spent my life returning to. I’ve rented a home by the beach because I imagine a life where I can walk seven blocks to the ocean. I feel the crunch of sand underfoot and a city where people aren’t booking a one-way ticket to my sternum. I feel the newness of it. I see a new story that could possibly be written. California brings a whole new vocabulary and I can taste the words.
On the plane, I can feel the grey skin peeling revealing a luminous gold. The cold concrete fades to sand and wheat-colored daylight.
In the car, in Los Angeles, on the way home, I whisper to myself: Hey, little girl. I know you wanna play. And, for the first time in my life, I do want this after a life of pain, of being burdened by my history. I want to be the child who plays.
Yessssss 🙌🙌👏👏💛💛