At first, NYC opens up to you like the hottest person in the room. It’s sexy, exciting, mysterious, and dangerous. It promises you great sex. And that's fine because you are young at heart, and you only want to get laid anyway, just like anyone when they first arrive here.
You think you are in a movie; everything looks strangely familiar and at the same time utterly different from what you expected. It is luring, glamorous and exciting. You want to check the NYC box and eat the entire apple!
Next night, next hookup, next job, next bar, hopping around in sparkling boozy nights, intoxicated by the glamour constantly oozing from the city. The city that never sleeps and it always keeps you awake at night.
You are going to make it in NYC. Pop the Champaign, chug the tequila, finish that line, and hold my beer because I'm taking this city by storm.
Uptown, downtown, uppers, and downers, it's the American dream. But watch out; everyone is jaded in NYC. And NYC will break your heart because it's a broken dream in an already broken world. It will take you down and challenge you to build yourself up again.
That's when it hits you hard: you hate NYC.
You hate the packed subway trains and every busy midtown crossing; the polite "good morning" that the CVS employee gives at you when you walk in just to ignore you a second later. Or the grumpy deli employee that isn't afraid to show how much he despises your guts at 4 am.
You hate the preppies all over uptown; bridge and tunnel people on weekends; the rank of freaks eyeing you late at night; smug faces shopping on Bleecker street, thick black-framed aloof artsy types drinking wine at Chelsea's vernissages; the latest spring collection; drivers honking outside your home at 2 am. You loathe the tiny apartments with windows that don't open; tiny apartment with windows that don't open with obscene monthly rent; bougie girls carrying little pets and designer bags; homeless people asking for cigarettes, white trash drunken youngsters barfing on the street; backstabbers having coffee and smiling at you before meetings; miserably unhappy servers trying to upsell; people hustling everywhere. And taxes! You can't hate anything else more than the taxes in NYC.
Running across the city, always late, always on time. You realize that the hustle and bustle is killing you. You want to yell at a corner: pretend is a city!
Like people suffering from a collective Stockholm syndrome, you think you can find solace in people going through the same thing as you. Then you gather with friends at a bar at a happy hour and cheer to NYC. Like war survivors, you feel proud that you made it this far. You convince yourself that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. But don’t forget: “live in NYC once but leave before it makes you hard.”
But part of you keeps hoping for one sign of humanity. Just one, that's all it takes. And then one day, without notice, it happens!
It is just another spring day, nothing special about it at all. You are walking on the street, and the sunlight hits the tree branches in a certain way, or a baby on a stroller – or an unknown passer-by – exchange eye contact with you. Or maybe you are at a restaurant, and the couple sitting next to you gets up and decides to dance on the street.
It's a small and fleeting moment. But that moment fills your heart with hope. All of a sudden, everything is possible again, and you love living that moment. That's when you realize you love NYC deeply.
To me, this is the real NYC – a city you can only know if you really pay attention to it and let it speaks to you. I checked that box and found out that beyond the glossy surfaces and the rigid inner layers, there's a heart pumping in there—the heart of NYC.
I’ll always ❤️ NYC.