Eight Years: New York City, 2021

In just about two weeks, we are leaving to visit New York City for the first time in eight years. I wish I could say I was excited about it. I’m not. I wish I could say I look forward to it. I don’t. – journal, June, 2021, Los Angeles, California

Eight years. One of those a pandemic. How is that possible?

Eight years. I have now been away from New York for the same span of time that it took to establish myself as a New Yorker.

I recall, with significant horror, the day I left New York. There is so much to do when one changes residences, and it seems there is no end in sight. No matter how well one plans and how stridently one sticks to the plan, when moving day arrives, it is never anything less than stressful, draining, panicky. This was that and then some. As good as I am at barricading my feelings in order to plow through big tasks, this almost broke me. Twenty five years in one place is a long time, especially when memory constricts you with every object you wrap, every book you decide whether to pack or donate, every photo that comes down from the wall. Undertaking a move is overwhelming, and memory, which we cherish so rightly, can be merciless. Often it is brutal.

When the moving truck arrived early Friday morning, I had been awake for 36 hours and counting. In times of great demand we can detach, which I did to get through that long and difficult day. When the moving truck finally pulled away, daylight was shifting to late afternoon shadows. I needed to shower but there was no soap, so I took a whore’s bath in that dime-sized city bathroom. I ordered a pizza for the last time from the pizzeria up the street that had fed us countless times. As much as I needed to eat, I was too exhausted to chew. I called my husband, whose work and a family crisis had kept him in LA, something like five times in a row, babbling incoherently into the phone. I slept on the bare floor that night, if sleep one can call it, my arms my pillow, the last quarter century of my life a weight that had nearly crushed me as life moved forward.

My flight back to LA was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. When the attendant opened the kiosk at daybreak, himself yawning as he waited for morning coffee to kick in, I was waiting. I was ready to pay any price to be put on the first flight available. He took pity on me, checked my bags wordlessly, changed my flight to one departing in an hour. I will never forget that definitive act of kindness, provided by a stranger to a stranger, somehow connecting us as travel is supposed to do. The wings on his spiffy red and black uniform told me he was experienced. Perhaps he was used to those of us who had always assumed that departure would be difficult, only to find that when the time actually arrived, we had no sentiment left.

One last push of effort propelled me through the airport and through the routine, by then so familiar and so deadening, of clearing security. That early, there were almost no lines, and I made it to the gate for what I thought would be the last time. I don’t really like flying and I am never able to sleep on planes, but that time I did, wedged into the only available seat. I awoke to the customary turbulence over the Rockies. Anyone who regularly makes the journey will tell you that that turbulence, once you are past it, is the signal that you are almost home. From there, the plane coasts over Las Vegas and into Los Angeles. It is a cliché to kiss the ground when a plane lands, but that time, I very goddam nearly did.

Eight years. Eight years into my life as New Yorker, I had just gotten my first good job and an apartment that would become a home. I wound up staying with both for over twice that span of time.

It has become a cliché, the Why I Left New York essay, but it means something to we who have had the experience. A very dear friend of mine, whose family traces its Anglo heritage to the Hudson Valley all the way back to the American Revolution, who was among the first to leave the city, always says “I would miss New York even if I was there.”

Oh, how painfully true that has turned out to be. I never thought that returning would be easy, and I certainly didn’t think I would be doing it during a pandemic. I am not sure I ever planned to return to New York at all except vaguely, abstractly, as one plans to see the Pyramids someday, without actually planning it out. As usual, John nudged me. I watched, quietly pleased, as he put his considerable skills for planning and execution to work to arrange the trip that he knew it was time to take, and that I had so effectively avoided for so many years.

I wish I could say that I got excited as departure day approached, but it was much more a continuum between the depth of sadness and the relief of numbness. John with excitement and myself joylessly, we packed luggage itself newly uncrated from the delivery boxes that have defined porches and mailrooms throughout the last couple of years. As with leaving New York eight years earlier, everything I did provoked memory, sometimes as subtle as a secret smile, sometimes so overwhelming I had to step away. 

As any memory keeper will tell you, memory is a bridge of associations. This was our first trip anywhere in over a year, other than local errands and work. LA had just begun to open up, after months of empty streets that any Angeleno will tell you were as chilling a sight as the morgue trucks filling the hospital parking lots. John and I had been able to visit our beloved Abbey a couple of times, masked, carded for vaccine status by the bouncer. We had even met friends, for the first time in over a year, at one of our local brunch places, local being all the more telling because the friends we met were fellow big apple expatriates.

Everything I did in preparation to return to New York was freighted by the weight of return, the disorientation of emerging from quarantine, the rue of desirable trips forgone. We were traveling cross country on a voyage I didn’t particularly want to make when we hadn’t visited our beloved Santa Ynez Valley even for a long weekend. I am not used to internal conflict but I am used to encumbrance, so I did what I always do, what in fact I had done during a long year, now so long ago, of being bi-coastal. I focus on the task at hand and power through in a mechanism akin to what jocks know as playing through the pain. I try to find and enjoy the good, and to share it by writing it down.

Eight years. Even as I write this, I am not sure how to process the life changes that have hit during my fifties.

John and I came of age as young gay men in the big city during AIDS. Most of us from that cohort found ourselves penned in by the memories of a plague, in response to the demands of a pandemic. My husband is a nurse and I work in healthcare. In our urban home, numbness and resignation to the tasks at hand were the perpetual state of being during the pandemic. Bleak days of powering through cannot help but provoke wounds cosmetically healed, but never fully cured, perhaps never curable.

Even as I write this, I am not sure how to process the life changes that have hit during my fifties. I don’t know how to reconcile a younger, thinner, often audacious version of myself with the wear and tear of the ensuing years. Maybe that’s the crux of the matter: it doesn’t actually feel like it was me. Maybe, as everyone from physicists to mystics to our own ancestors keep trying to teach us, time and distance are, in fact, one.

A common exercise among those in recovery from dysfunctional and traumatic childhoods is for the adult to write a letter to their younger self. It is much, much more difficult than it seems, and the concluding action – to visualize one’s older self physically and emotionally comforting the hurting, frightened child – is emotionally searing, often not withstandable. Is that what this column is, a letter to my younger self?

During the pandemic, I was in a valley of deep, deep depression. John and I are fortunate: we didn’t suffer from COVID 19, as so many did and still are. It made acknowledging my very real condition seem ungrateful and selfish. There was no way not to feel the depression, but the needs of the situation provided a bulwark to get through the day. The bulwark became a fortress, and then surrounding the fortress, a moat. That is the very, ironically stated, recipe for anxiety. I became, in so many ways, hypervigilant against absolutely anything and everything that might go wrong.

It was so difficult not to. It was such a strange, surreal world. Everything was affected. Everything. Common errands one thought nothing of became tactical maneuvers. I recall lining up outside our local Ralph’s, the heroic tie guy clicking entrants and exits like the bouncer at a club, the heroes within withstanding a frazzled, frightening populace behaving badly about empty shelves. I recall driving through parking lots where we had parked a thousand times, to receive our provisions through the open window of the car. I recall sitting in the parking lot of the dreaded membership warehouse while John went inside because I just couldn’t bring myself to get out of the car. And I recall John’s triumph touching my heart dearly as he found a ham for the annual Easter dinner that means so much to him, no doubt meant that much more due to the circumstances of the time.

During the pandemic, we all folded in, and often made very good things – literally. I watched with no small amount of communal pride as we posted about bread we were baking, plants we were nurturing, books we were reading. For every haircut we couldn’t get there was someone learning to cut hair at home, for every restaurant forced to shutter there was someone learning to cook.

We read, we crafted, we baked bread, all in the spirit of what the record of this blog is meant to be. And for every grocery line we the bourgeoisie stood in, every medical appointment we had to take online, every job and classroom transferred to the home front, there are entire communities where those are the norm if one is lucky, for there are those whose common life is none at all. And that is one of the lessons of this record: gratitude.

As time recedes, it accumulates. What really is the difference between eight years and one summer ago? What will be the difference one summer hence? The difference is however many we have left – hopefully very many, hopefully together, doing good, responding to good fortune with gratitude and ill fortune with fortitude, and always caring. It is not about leaving New York or arriving in LA or returning to New York or staying in LA. It is not about travel though it is a voyage. It is about being where you are.