The Long Goodbye

Finding my feet after a year in limbo

Every fleeting moment is as meaningless as it is monumental. The day I went to see the apartment in Alphabet City, the sun was shining, an easy breeze caressing the fire escape, unusually uncharacteristic of the messy hell that was New York City summer. In my highly romanticized memory, that apartment was sealed in a sepia photograph. Location, location, location. It was one block up from the cafe where Rent was set, one block down from Marsha P. Johnson’s old shelter, and a five-minute run to the East River. It was love at first sight, a hopeless infatuation. The truth was nothing fit in that apartment; the floor wasn’t even flat. I was told that was normal for a pre-war walk-up. Every piece of furniture I managed to sweep in from IKEA was eventually leveled by cardboards. The amazing thing about New York is that every misfortune (and there are a lot of misfortunes) can reminisce something a beloved protagonist went through in a movie you saw or a book you read–Alice and Charlotte in The Last Days of Disco, Willem and Jude in A Little Life–and then you don’t feel so bad anymore. Every moment seems to be riding on potential greatness. You just don’t know it yet. In this town, romanticization is part of survival. 

I was leaning over on this conviction that something great would come out of this apartment until the mice came and stayed for a year and had baby mice, until old neighbors moved out and new ones moved in, until the roaches came, until I started crying in bed, in the shower, in Tompkins Square Park, until the virus came, until life went on, regardless of my tantrum, day by day, year by year, until I stopped crying and grew up. Nothing too great came out of that apartment apart from twelve boxes of junk and an émigré in limbo. It was August 29, 2021, the day I moved out of Alphabet City. I am now writing this at a table in a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn, in which I have been cautiously comfortable for the last four months, despite the generosity of my friend, the official tenant of the place. The apartment sits on a block where old men say “How are ya?” from their stoops and they demand an answer; they really want to know how you are. Small talks are not only a courtesy but also a custom, the kind of friendliness I warned myself not to get too used to. 

When I look back at the last year, a year, in retrospect, feels so ephemeral and eternal at the same time, all of those moments, moments as meaningless as they are monumental, ignite the hippocampus in kaleidoscopic fractals: with the slightest rotation of the cone, the pieces, fragmented, scattered, alter the pattern altogether at once, their meanings intricately intertwined in the absence of a singular, linear thread. Consider this:

I remember the day I went to get a pepper spray. I had tacos for lunch, and the shop assistant had told me they did not have one. My best chance, he continued, was to try the other Target on the Lower East Side. “I understand when you need one, you need one,” a queer man himself, the shop assistant spoke with a hushed sense of urgency. It was March 2021, after the Atlanta shooting, before the vaccines. I was at the time interviewing at a boutique consultancy with a pre-pandemic office in Flatiron for a role that had embarrassingly been my dream job. Naive as I was, I questioned the company’s lack of diversity in the first few rounds of culture-fit screenings. 

    “How many people of color currently work at the company?”

“Hmm. Nobody has ever asked me that question before. It depends on what color you’re looking for,” responded the HR.

I suppressed my urge to blunder and say: “Blue. How many smurfs work there?” Instead, I swallowed my words and sent carefully timed follow-up emails. They kept me in the loop for more than two months before finally terminating my candidacy.

When I got the news I was relieved. It was a Friday in late May, which happened to be, in the city’s collective memory, the day when New York felt like New York again. I had dinner with two friends indoors and told them I had made up my mind to move to Shanghai. The decision, part closure, part catharsis, was my last resort. It was my concluding quest for some coherence in the narrative I called my life, a decision driven by consolation if not convenience. In that chain of compromises I retired from the conviction that every story had its moral, and incidentally, I retrieved the courage to bid my farewells.

Not every story has its moral; not every rationale is rational. Everything doesn’t happen for a reason; everything happens. That night we went out. At a long communal table on the sidewalk in Williamsburg, when I was about to drop a tequila shot into a pint of draft beer, one of my best friends introduced me to a friend of hers who worked at Vox. She said she would love to refer me to any job there. I extended my lease for another two months and started interviewing again. As it turned out, indoor dining wasn’t the only thing reopened that week. So did the job market. This time I no longer had any expectations. Weary from even the idea of settling for a job paying an insulting amount of salary, I insisted I had long overstayed my welcome in a country where my worth was incessantly dismissed. I was already living with the expectation of leaving.

I still wondered if there was anything worth staying for. For almost a year, I was in a Covid situationship with a man. A year of outdoor dinners and long intimate conversations (there was nothing else to do during the lockdown), a year of tip-toeing around the “Where are we?” question, I finally accepted we were never quite there. He was already seeing other people, and I started going on dates again, dates I never took seriously, on which I turned out to have had a great time. The sweet sweet taste of hedonism, of living in the moment. That summer I danced like I had never danced before, in the Village, in Bushwick, in Fire Island Pines. I recalled a five-year-old at his grandmother’s seventy-year-old birthday party twirling like a fairy in the middle of the dance floor, the center of all attention, avoiding the confused eyes of the surrounding adults. I smiled at that five-year-old self I disparaged and abandoned. The martyr smiled back and vanished. It was my pride, to make peace with myself. I interviewed with perhaps at least twenty companies in the two months that came after the rejection, from high-profile magazines to retirement non-profits, from mar-tech agencies to consultancies… One Friday in July, I received two job offers. That night I pressed my head into a man’s chest, its rise and fall fuzzy, steady, and musky, and I slept through the night for the first time in a long time. 

My relationship with New York had reached a bottleneck where the quantitative experience under my belt refused to effect qualitative changes. It was a precarious codependency, an arrangement of convenience. Four years later, all I wore was black, head-to-toe black, different textures of black, black on black, mourning perhaps only my pretentious youth. Life in the city got too comfortable, I knew exactly which spot to go to for a quick pick-me-up; I knew which roofs had the least tourists; I knew which way was Uptown when getting out of the station on 28th St and Broadway simply by identifying the acute angle on the catty-corner. By building a fortress I built an imprisonment for myself. Like they always said, nowhere else could possibly be good enough anymore. I took one of the two offers in Chicago. Relocation was due in September.

Like a toxic man, New York lures you back only when you threaten to leave: in early summer, I ended up in a Central Park promotion video that went live on Instagram and CW for a hot second. I vaguely felt I had left a mark in the city. On a random Tuesday afternoon, I ran into Jeremy O. Harris in the East Village, right after having lunch with a good friend where I broke the news of moving to Chicago. He invited me to a screening of his new movie, Zola, and the story ended up in the Sunday Times. I took none of it seriously. It only reminded me how, when I had first moved to New York, a friend warned me that the proximity to greatness in this town can cause a delusion that you are actually a part of something great–you see the most accomplished people in every possible field at the next table at dinner, in theaters, in Meatpacking nightclubs. The city offered anonymity and visibility at the same time. I had nothing to do with the visibility. It was always the anonymity I preferred. At this point, I’d rather be heard than seen.

Relocation was upended by the Delta variant. I had to take shelter at my friend’s place in Brooklyn for the time being. The two weeks before I moved out of my old apartment, every morning I walked to Tompkins Square Park to cry. I said goodbye to the guy at my corner bodega, the guy at my other bodega, my barber, the owner of the coffee shop I frequented, and my neighbor. “It’s only Brooklyn. You are being so dramatic,” said my friends, who all thought I was moving to Mars. But in New York, every five blocks is a different world. I was so attached to that apartment because I considered myself its witness. Yes, like all the tenants that came before me, I was only passing by. So many times, I wondered who onced lived there, who stared at the same ceiling in the morning, who made love in there, who cried, who broke up, and who passed. What didn’t occur to me was that that apartment was also my witness, through phases of stagnation and transformation alike. As it turned out, that simple reciprocation was great enough for me.

I loved the job. As obnoxious as it sounds, it was the first job in my life I had ever truly loved. The compassionate female leadership and the unmistakable Midwestern hospitality at the company made me question even more if I had stayed and suffered in New York for so long for all the wrong reasons. It would’ve been a much easier town had I known what I wanted from it. But I didn’t. That fall I read Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That over and over again wondering if this was the end between New York and me. Everybody in New York was running away from something. But what was I running towards? All the misfortunes and the subsequent romanticization seemed frivolous and futile. A goodbye long overdue. In this whirlwind of changes, continuing to live a life in limbo, I tried to grasp onto the familiar: I still went to Veniero’s to get the pignolis my old neighbor got me when I moved away and I still walked to the old apartment on E 11th St occasionally and looked up at the warmly lit window and wondered who was its new witness. There were so many talks about “the end of the tunnel” during the pandemic. I had no idea where the tunnel was taking me. I could only keep going.

New York’s second attempt to keep me was a phone call in September. A company I reached out to in June got back to me after three months. Several phone calls later, they made an offer that was hard for me to turn down. Can you be content and still want more? I felt like an ungrateful cheater, a sentiment I was not used to. I decided to take the job and stay in New York. I said my goodbyes on the company’s Monday morning call and thanked everyone for making me feel like I belonged, that I was heard and respected. The three things I yearned for during my four years’ sojourn in the United States, which weren’t always easy. I never thought I could be myself at work. Now I knew it was possible.

I’ve always loved that ciao means hello and goodbye at the same time. I said so many goodbyes in the last year, to people to parties to places to patterns to ideas to fantasies, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes voluntarily, that all together they merged and stretched into a long goodbye. Aren’t we always just leaving? We may not even realize but we are saying goodbye every moment, to the previous moment, to an older self, to the belief that change only happens every now and then, that change isn’t in every moment. And yet, what’s wrapped in that bitterness is the sweetness that saying goodbye also means saying hello to a new moment and a new self. Like the word ciao, there is always the promise of hello embedded in goodbye.

Those few months living with an expiry date in New York gave me fresh eyes to see the city anew. Now I knew what I wanted from it: I wanted the stories. Give me the stories. I would tell the stories in return. Ironically, the tunnel took me right back to where I was. On Christmas eve I signed the lease for a new apartment in the East Village. At the end of the tunnel was someone who knew what they wanted. With that, I felt equally vulnerable and invincible and oddly comfortable in the brave new world. Right after signing the lease I texted my old neighborhood. He replied: “WELCOME BACK.” But this time I felt, in all honesty, like I was headed for somewhere entirely new.