Breaking Up with New York City, my Longest Standing Love Affair
Five years ago, any hopes of being united in love under canopies of sunshine trickling through the negative space between leaves in a wondrous fairy tale forest were dashed when the mantles of “young” and “stupid” proved themselves stronger qualities than I’d dare admit. Melissa dumped me immediately. I’m going back to New York, I thought, surrounded by tears and the wrenching heartache of realizing that yeah, this person did care for me, and no, I shouldn’t have done that.
At the time, I was performing as a life-size Baby T-Rex in the show, Walking With Dinosaurs, sometimes taking the prehistoric pup overseas, and I needed a new home base. New York City was a relentless origin point, myself returning when the director of my destitute life called, “back to one.”
Returning to the city was familiar — it’d granted me wings out of high school — emotionally chaotic, and attached in the way you run clinging back to an ex-girlfriend; the satisfying, yet remorseful embrace, which seconds earlier attempted to destroy you. After ten years of relentless push/pulling, I’ve decided that I’d like to pursue happiness, or something, and move out of the jarring cesspool that has both exalted and tortured my ambitions to no end.
The young artists of New York stalwartly united in untapped potential, vehement rebellions, and dreams regretfully unfulfilled. Depressing sounding, maybe, but for me, I loved this modern re-imagining of “The Island of Misfit Toys,” Charlie-in-the-Box, spotted elephants, et. al., ourselves inherent nobodies striving to figure things out, and through all that, becoming somebody. Class walls were breached and togetherness found under the common shroud of it all pretty much sucking. Yes, life was beautiful.
Aspirations kept us positive — that screenplay, or manuscript, or canvas, or role, or internship, to empower the perpetual maybe — in our heads. The harder edges of life provided character, spice, and enchantment, fodder for new material, that sardonic New York underground growing all the more palatable when properly scorned.
This city’s mentality, unfortunately, is one of endless undoing. You’re not strong enough, unresolved, underpaid, and overworked. If balance is found, it’s immediately thwarted by bigger dreams — though there is a certain sheen to the madness. In an effort to constantly better itself, New York is an idealistic antidote to dullness ever poisoned with aggravated stimulation.
For the latter half of my tenure, I — like most — constantly toyed with moving away from these struggles that seemed to add weight to merely living. Again, I’d answer the phone and crawl back to her apartment, to be expectedly beaten, bloodied, and left for dead the following morning. I swore to overcome these masochistic tendencies. Again, I crawled back — the sex was that good.
The voice of my inner child, since muted, hidden by the goblin king over a decade of romantic torment, spoke in bursts. When explosions quieted, my head still dizzy, brief clarity reared. These moments added up, and soon, instead of succumbing to the knowing embrace of a cyclically destructive goddess, I fell back into myself. The stars showed an intricate pattern, and I saw beyond the ouroboros into an existence quite personal, unique, and self-affirming. There was no questioning why or how, only being, as a flower that takes no great stake in its existence and simply cherishes the sun.
Sisyphus suddenly realized that he was—always had been—able to stop pushing the accursed rock up the hill. At my relinquishing of “necessary struggle,” New York suddenly lost its relevance.
Like The Matrix’s faithless Cypher, some might keep at it, proclaiming, “This rock is super entertaining. I’ll stay.” To others, the rock is evidence of their own existence, and to stop pushing would be to stop life altogether.
We soon learn that there is no difference between red and blue pills — the colors are arbitrary. In choosing non-torment, it’s simply a choice, and that’s it. There will be more cycles, but choice creates action, which sends waves through the imagination, making it, in some sense, so.
In 2013, I wrote An Innocent’s Guide to Contemporary Sin, for Inside.Co, a three-day guide to New York City. I poured dedicated experience into those pages—the most extraordinary restaurants, tucked away museums, hidden beaches, and oft-missed landmarks (have you ever looked “up” in the atrium of Grand Central Station? Next time, do it)—not yet having resolved to leave. The guide was a love letter, my last attempt to connect with something lost.
Like any rapturous affair, my decade in New York broke me in all the right ways. For the sake of your unpublished memoirs, think about spending your twenties in this sort of delicious motivation.
Now, at the crux of definitive choice, clear purposes, and time spent, the phone doesn’t even ring—she’s done with me too, it seems—and I walk toward my present life forgotten, reclaimed, and confoundedly alive.
