East River

Most people use a standard set of adjectives when describing New York. They'll say it's vibrant, but Bangkok is too. They'll say it feels dangerous, but in fairness, so does a lot of Chicago and Los Angeles. They'll talk about the culture, but Berlin has a lot of culture too. These people are just describing the features of cities generally, and perhaps a little embarrassed to say what they actually think of New York. I believe, for tourists and newcomers alike, the abiding sense of New York is that it is just difficult. At least it was for us.

We moved here in the Summer of 2023 for what was supposed to be a three-month sabbatical from the South. I cannot emphasize enough how bad we were at everything when we moved here. Getting around, getting groceries, and even getting coffee felt like some sort of reality show challenge.

We were constantly glued to our phones trying to decode the seemingly capricious MTA schedule. Our first sublet was about a 10-minute walk to the nearest metro stop. I once got caught in rain so hard that the dye in my sneakers bled. Despite nearly ubiquitous food retailers, it's actually hard to assemble a full grocery cart from any of them with any degree of economy. With a then 18 month old in tow, the amount of supplies needed to confidently leave the apartment felt like we were embarking on a gypsy caravan.

For the casual traveler, here for a weekend or a work trip, these frictions are part of the thrill. A few days feeling a little over your skis can actually be edifying. As the days stretch into weeks though, and you still feel a real sense of relief when you actually make it back to your apartment, you begin to wonder if the constant pang of incompetence is really just a passing phase.

Then, like magic, you find the rhythm of urban living. Sometime in July, when were about to head out Tab says, "Well, the last stop for B43 is on Box Street and if we leave in the next 10 minutes it will still be waiting there." You realize that the G train is remarkably short and so you really need to walk to the middle of the platform to ensure that you aren't on an end car. You internalize that its better to be in a middle car for safety reasons, since if anything weird is happening you have two points of egress instead of just one. You are indignant that the closest market charges $12 for a pound of strawberries.

At some point, we decided we were going to stay. I don't remember having a real discussion about it. My ham-fisted analogy is a tuning fork. New York is a tuning fork on your psyche. If you are inclined to a pastoral, small-town existence, the dissonance is unbearable. If you want the frictionless ease and comfort of suburban living, the grit of high-density will always chafe you.

That first apartment had two-story floor-to-ceiling windows that looked directly at Midtown. I lay in bed looking at the lights across the East River, thinking of the millions of lives and nights playing out. I was looking at first dates and breakups, late nights working on big deals, dishwashers and service workers grinding to survive and ascend in the world's symbol of American opportunity. Every lighted window contained a story. Proximity to the full range of human experience was, and is, intoxicating, and I couldn't imagine being any further from it than a bridge or train ride away.

Of course, we were doing things in reverse. Most people come here in their early twenties. If they are professionally tracked, they get inducted into a raj of status games and eventually have children. When the cost of continuing to play becomes untenable, they leave for the suburbs or further-flung locales. We got married, bought a home, had a kid, then uprooted everything 18 months later to try on the city.

Achieving a level of material comfort in our mid-30s had exposed a hidden truth of adult life. Despite the oft-cited epitaph that "life is short", the experience of living it actually feels more interminable. Sometime between 30 and 45 you begin to realize that your "somedays" have become your todays. You begin to hold the paradox of your remaining time being both fleeting and glacial. I had lived in Richmond my entire life. I attended college nearby, opened and closed a highly visible business, dated, and got married at the art museum.

My sense of self, both internally and externally, was weighed down by the past, by the seasons of life when you are still figuring out who you are and who you want to become. There is a temptation to blame statis, but rather, my twenties and thirties had felt like a long period transition that had delivered me into a life arrived at by deduction. I had achieved a kind of weighted average of my aspirations, but the parts that got blended out felt noticeably absent and crucial.

A temporary move was supposed to be clarifying. The anonymity of a new city offered the opportunity to form new relationships as the person I had grown into. The challenges of urban living had a salutary effect on my sense of vitality. In those first few weeks, nice weather combined with my transit ineptitude meant I was walking four to five miles every day. Having Frankie with us, I was heaving the stroller up and down stairs at every turn. This restored my sense of physicality and exposed the absurd improbability of 8.3 million people living in just 300 square miles. That's roughly 30,000 people per square mile. By comparison, Richmond has around 3,500 people per square mile.

This kind of inescapable density seems to inspire one of two opposite reactions in people. The first is that you are in direct competition for the resources on offer, and that you need to grind your way to top of an endless greasy pole of economic security. In New York, this is futile since there really is no top. As you ascend you only learn of new even higher echelons that seem just as aspirational as the one you may have just achieved.

Almost without exception, the most miserable people in the city are those who have worked their way into the third quartile of the socioeconomic distribution. They live in constant tension, maintaining the totems of their status while also grasping for the next level. Breaking into the top 25% will only bring on an entirely new set of previously unconsidered anxieties and standards to maintain.

If I could pay my rent, find intellectually gratifying work, and be present for my family, the long transition into adulthood would end. This is its own form of delusion, but it felt like a more useful one than whatever I was doing before. I wanted to spend more time reading, more time writing, and more time popping out to meet a friend for drinks without endless back-and-forth planning texts. I wanted to hop on a subway with Frankie and take her to the Dumbo carousel. I wanted to be a member of the Natural History Museum just to walk around in its midcentury charm. I wanted the adventure, the access, and yes, the grit and difficulty just beyond our front door, for as long as I could maintain it.

This wasn't about "putting down roots" or thinking about the long arc of time. It was about no longer striving for salves on a life you didn't choose. It was about making those somedays, todays.

Sometime in August of the year we moved, we were feeling more settled, and the decision to stay or go back was coming ever closer into focus. I booked a ticket to go to the 10:30pm showing of Oppenheimer in Kips Bay. I left the apartment around 9:30 to walk to the Greenpoint Ferry, which would take me to 34th Street, where I could walk the rest of the way to the AMC. It was one of those perfect late-Summer nights where the heat of the day gives way to a slightly cool evening with a warm breeze coming off the river.

The ferry from Greenpoint cuts directly across the East River and glides in under FDR Drive, right by the American Copper Building. Three months earlier, I fumbled in the rain trying to buy ferry tickets from an antiquarian kiosk designed to withstand abuse and discourage use. Tonight, my ticket was loaded on my phone.

As we made way, I went to the top deck. It was crowded, but I noticed something rare. Something that you almost never experience in the day-to-day rush of the city. No one aboard that municipal boat wanted to be anywhere else. No one was scrolling their feed, immersed in noise-cancelling headphones, or eagerly waiting to disembark. We all watched as the Manhattan skyline approached, transforming from postcard image to real live place. The ramp would drop and we would disembark, each becoming one of those millions of stories I watched every night from across the river.