When I was 10 years old I told my dad that when I grew up, I was going to live in New York City, and that I would stay there forever.
We were on an airplane flying home from La Guardia after my first ever trip to Manhattan. It was a rite of passage gifted to each of his nieces and nephews by my Uncle Mark, who has never lived in the city but has been a frequent visitor and investor in several Broadway and off-Broadway shows.
My Grandpap, who had joined us on the trip, asked why I would want to live in New York City.
I considered the question. In the past three days, I had been allowed to swear without limit, judgment or consequence; craft perfect loogies that I could spit out of the high-rise hotel window; and channel John Bonham on a drum kit made of plastic buckets and cans, because my Grandpap had floated a busker a fiver.
I had also gotten to see the most amazing man-made structures that I had ever seen or have seen since. And I know this is going to sound cliché, especially in reference to New York City, but I had felt a palpable energy all around me that I had never before experienced. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
“Well, because it’s the best place I have ever been,” I said.
Sixteen years later, it still is.
***
In the past eight years, I have lived in 10 different places. Some have been great. Others have been horrible. Some have been rural and landlocked. Others have been oceanfront or metropolitan.
But until recently I’ve only ever considered one of these places to be home: the two-story house my father built across from a sprawling cornfield in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, a very small town just north of Pittsburgh where we had to drive 15 minutes to get to the closest store, gas station or fast food restaurant.
My dad finished building the house when I was incubating within my mother, so it is the only house I “grew up” in.
No matter where I was living at the time, I would always tell people I was “going home” to western Pennsylvania whenever I was making trips to see my family and friends. To me, the meaning of home was instilled in me to mean where your life was centered, where you could always go and be welcomed, where the most important people in your life resided. And I have been unfathomably lucky to have always had such a lovely home base.
However, just because the land north of Pittsburgh is where I come from, it was never where I wanted to stay. I’ve always been restless, anxious and unsatisfied with where I spent my formative years. At the risk of sounding like a complete douchebag, I always craved something more that I felt my hometown and other temporary living locations could not accommodate. There was something in me that wanted to break away from the comfort of the home I’d always known, to go out and “make something of myself” and all that other shit you’ve heard from people justifying their reasoning for becoming New Yorkers.
***
You know how sometimes when you get really simultaneously nervous and excited for something that your butthole clinches? It’s a feeling I generally get whenever I believe a girl is about to allow me to kiss her on the mouth.
It’s also the feeling I felt when my dad and I crossed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on moving day a little less than two years ago. Maybe I was aroused by a place. Which is weird, but whatever.
My randiness for the city wasn’t quashed at all when I decided to throw on some Avett Brothers on the way into Brooklyn.
After years of trying, and failing, to land a full-time gig in New York City that had anything to do with writing, I had secured a job as a copywriter at a pharmaceutical marketing and training agency. Yeah, I didn’t know what that meant when I started, either. Actually, I worked there for more than a year and I’m still not exactly sure how to describe what they do. A good friend of mine from college had moved to the city three years prior. His lease was up and he had found us a place to live in Bushwick. It was a decent and affordable apartment by NYC standards, but mostly unremarkable when compared with the oceanfront condo I rented for like $600 a month in coastal Maryland. Especially when you consider that the condo had a spiral staircase.
Still, this is my favorite place I have ever lived. You should check out my room. It’s very Scott Muska. (Open invitation, ladies!)
It’s not only my apartment, though, that I love so much. It’s the city itself, the people who occupy it, and all of the professional, social and generally enriching life experiences one can have while they’re living here.
In New York, there is never a shortage of things to do or see, and the people… there are so many people. The human beings you get to interact with and know seem infinite. Someone is always doing something crazier or more illegal than whatever it is you’re doing. Someone is always doing something as good and probably better than you, and they’re probably doing it only a few miles from wherever you’re doing whatever it is you do to try and succeed.
In this place, you can never run out of opportunities to prove yourself and to improve at whatever your passion may be. I have never been to a place that so tangibly displays the potential of human beings. Everything here is man-made, and complexly so. Think about all of the tunnels underneath such a big city, and then think of the buildings and initiatives on top of those tunnels, not to mention the amazing art and intellect an straight-up uniqueness the people here have to offer. For me, that is much more impressive than some huge ass canyon that some glaciers formed thousands of years ago.
People often told me when I moved here that I would fall out of love with the city after a few months. That I would stop staring in awe at all of the beautiful buildings and gorgeous, fashion-forward people. That hipsters would start to annoy the fuck out of me. That I would become jaded by the fast-paced and sometimes insane environment.
But none of that has happened yet. Each time I come back, Brooklyn takes me in, and I’m happy she does.
***
I was in Saxonburg to visit the family a couple weeks ago. I had some time off before I started the copywriting portfolio program in Brooklyn that I’m desperately hoping will be a big stepping stone toward success.
When I was there, a strange thing happened: without noticing or consciously deciding to do so, I began referring to Brooklyn as “home.” I was unaware of this until one night a friend and I was drunk and he said I was confusing him, that he didn’t know which place I was referring to when I used the noun.
I decided to go with it—might have even took it a little bit too far. When my dad dropped me off at the bus station at the end of my visit, the last thing I said to him was,
“Well. I think I’ll go home now.”
And I did.
Because now Brooklyn is home, and it seems as though it will stay that way. New York might not be the center of the universe, but it’s the center of my universe.
I’ve never been happier.
