It’s the beginning of 2016, a typically cold day during late winter in New York. On this particular day, crossing the street during my mid-week lunch hour, I look up Madison Avenue and observe it’s usual midday bustle of business people, nannies, dogs and cabs. It’s a cloudy day, but still the Empire State Building stands, as it always has, a monument – a picture of New York. A monument that meets the expectations of the dreamers who arrive in this city and one that still reminds me every time I catch a glimpse of it that I live here, in New York City.
This view up Madison Avenue is still the first image that comes to mind whenever someone says ‘New York’. This particular part, in the high 20s that is a little too far east and doesn’t get many tourists. Its a never ending avenue that only fades due to the limitations of your eyes, not your mind; a street full of yellow cabs weaving between one another, honking horns and cross walks flooded with people pushing forward to their next dentation. A crowd of people not slowing down, never slowing down. And so, here it is, my New York. My memory, my dream.
As I stand here, taking pause in the shadow of the Empire State Building I feel as if I’m looking on a memory, rather than living in the present. Witnessing a time gone by; a story about “that one time I...”. Because, standing here, on this cold winter morning, I know I have already decided to leave New York. In one year, this city, this wonderfully messy, difficult, incomparable city will be behind me. It’s a strange thought, when you’re in the middle of it.
The city itself feels like the "blue of the mountains" described by Rebecca Solnit. As you look ahead you see the blue beauty of the distance. The blue makes everything more enticing, it draws you to it, you want to be held in its splendor. But as you get closer to those mountains in the blue of the distance you realize that the blue has moved further and further away. A target that can never be met. A goal which can never be achieved. And this is exactly what I feel now, standing on Madison Avenue, about New York. For a short time, I thought I would always be in New York. Not because I wanted to be, not because New York was my forever, but simply because I had no other plans and New York was the best place I could think to be.
As I have grown into New York these past several years, I’ve realized that it is not the dream itself that has begun to feel unreachable here, but that the dream was never in New York in the first place. New York is the place I felt I was supposed to dream about, so I let it become my dream. But now I know my dreams will lead me and land me elsewhere. New York has been a fun distraction, the part of the journey in which I decided to take the long way around.
The breadth and depth of my New York memories feel like a lifetime ago and lifetimes among themselves. From that first view of the skyline riding in from JFK in the back of a yellow cab on the BQE, to the lovers I’ve had, the heartbreak I’ve cried through, the sidewalk rats, blistering winters and magical summer nights, New York has given me more than I can imagine and taken just as much. It is a piece of my story I will never regret and never wish to give back.
Standing on this corner, I take in this vista – one of the last times I will look down Madison Avenue as a resident of this City. In this moment New York feels like an eternity, one I used to want to be part of. So, New York, thank you for the storm, but in the words of Joan Didion, “Goodbye to all that.”