Staying The Distance

5 minute read

I am outside a diner on Montague Street, waiting for eggs and a bialy. It’s raining and we can sit inside again now, but I like it here, under the blue awning, surrounded by planters. Growing up in Ireland, I always liked the sound of the rain.

Brooklyn is where I come to write, but for nine months I’ve stayed away. Today, I masked up and took the forty-five-minute journey on the 2 train from my Upper West Side apartment. I came here to fall in love again.

To start, my love affair with New York City was long-distanced. Growing up in Dublin, I got to know the city through the eyes of 1980’s sitcom characters like Arnold and Willis Drummond, and later, my heroes, Christine Cagney and Mary-Beth Lacy. Sitting close to the television screen, I drank it all in - this city with skies crammed full of buildings and streets crammed full of people who looked so different from each other. Where I lived, we all looked the same. And at Mass every week, it was clear we were supposed to think the same way too.

I was nine when I carefully cut out photos from New York travel brochures for a geography project, but it would be another decade before I boarded a plane with my two best friends for the first of four student summers. What I remember most about that first night - spent in a cell-like single room at Columbia University - is that sleeping was impossible. It wasn’t just the heat and the noise - sirens of course, and something that sounded like gunshots - but it was the physical excitement of the city being all around me, knowing it was right there, outside my tiny window.

That was 1993 and fifteen years later, I found myself back for another extended stay. After those student summers I had sustained myself with holidays, short trips that were never enough, but this time was different. For one thing, I was alone, renting an apartment in Fort Green - my first time in Brooklyn. For another, my life had just derailed.

Ostensibly, I came to write. My first novel was as yet unpublished - and worse still, seemingly unpublishable - and the plan was to work on my second. I justified the investment in the trip with the projected word count I would have when I returned but it didn’t work out that way. Those September days were too enticing to stay inside so I walked instead, exploring Brooklyn and Manhattan block by block. I carried a notebook everywhere, jotting down sentences on the subway, park benches, in coffee shops. My inner drill sergeant told me I was squandering this hard-won time, that I’d never finish my novel, but for once I could drown out her voice - I was too busy falling deeper in love.

The scribbles in that notebook became an essay about Brooklyn - a love letter of sorts - that would turn out to be my first published piece, printed in The Irish Times travel section. I wasn’t paid, but that didn’t matter. Something had changed. Something had changed in me.

Change has a domino effect - at least that’s what I found - so once you’ve started, you’d better watch out because more is on the way.

In the Irish version of my life, I was a 34-year-old straight woman, recently dumped by a boyfriend after a decade of living together. But three thousand miles from home, I had a broader lens and the ability to hold in my mind - even for only a few seconds - the possibility that I might, in fact, be gay. Over the next twelve months I worked on holding that thought for a little longer each time, until, when I came back to Brooklyn the following September, I fell in love again - this time with a woman.

In my girlfriend - the woman who is now my wife - I found someone whose love of New York rivalled my own. During those early days I showed her Park Slope and Fort Greene, while she took me to pockets of Manhattan I’d never have found alone. When we decided to see how we’d fare long distance, we made playlists for each other, CDs we sent in the mail. One of mine was a New York soundtrack that took us from 4th Street to Chelsea and all the way up to Harlem, crossing 110th Street, the cover fashioned from photos cut-out from a magazine, channelling my nine-year-old self.

It’s nine years since I moved here and we’ve made a life together, my wife and I. Our New York life has a rhythm and a flow, or at least it did until last year. We had a sense of what was coming a little earlier than some - I still listen to Irish news on the radio - and we’d stocked up on toilet paper and other supplies during the first weekend of March. But it’s three weeks later that the reality of what we’re facing hits me. Driving over the 59th Street Bridge on a Sunday night - coming home from what would turn out to be our last day trip for a long time - the city is shining in the darkness, so close it looks like you could pick it up. My tears are sudden, they make the lights of the skyline blurry and when my wife glances over, she doesn’t ask why I’m crying, she just reaches out and holds my hand.

Her first symptoms of the virus come that night, a milder iteration than the version I would get ten days later with chest pains and breathlessness that lasts for months. And like so many others we focus on getting better, on the pattern of each day in our one-bedroom apartment, punctuated by Zoom calls and the clanging of pots and pans at seven o’clock. It’s not until four months later on a trip to Maine when our lives begin to grow again, that we realize just how much they had shrunk.

Driving home from Maine, I feel a heaviness. I’ve never felt this before - I’ve always been excited to be back in the city - but this night, eating pizza at a sidewalk table, my attention is on the overflowing garbage cans, the overgrown shrubbery. The five-minute walk home feels longer on blocks darkened by shuttered businesses, their doorways homes to people in the shadows. A few days later, a doctor’s appointment takes us close to the New York Public Library, where weeds push up through the gaps in the flagstones in front of the locked double doors. A week after that, we rent an apartment in Long Beach, a breezy white space on the edge of the ocean that becomes our home for the next two months.

It’s my longest period away from New York since I moved here and coming back, I want to feel excitement, but mostly I just feel apprehensive. Since we’ve been away, the stories about living in the city only seem to grow worse. On Facebook, one friend relentlessly posts photos of people moving out of his building, another - a lifelong New Yorker - documents her own move to New Jersey. Entering our building, I see Con Edison have tried to install new meters - they’ve left notices on the doors of apartments they couldn’t access. Of the nine apartments on our floor, I count seven notices.

It’s been an adjustment, shrinking our lives back into this space without the respite of the rolling waves outside - navigating around each other’s work schedules has seemed more challenging than before. I decide to use a background of the Rose Reading Room for the creative writing class I teach from my bedroom, even though half my face disappears whenever I turn my head. The overflowing laundry hamper by my elbow isn’t visible on screen but it’s hard to ignore it all the same. For the first time, I find myself wondering if New York is really where I want to be. If it will ever be possible to love the city the way I once had?

Falling in love is easy, staying in love is hard. I saw that once, written on a greeting card and I’ve been thinking about it lately. The movies tell us that’s what love is - that all-consuming insatiable thirst for the other person, that filling, falling, freeing, expansiveness that makes me want to layer my life with yours in a way that somehow makes even more room for me. That’s where the characters are when the credits roll and we conclude that love is a feeling, that love is that feeling. And that with true love, that feeling should be effortless.

Love is a choice, that’s what I’ve learned in an eleven-year relationship where we love each other imperfectly.

I can choose to put my attention on the things that irk me - and I can always find things to irk me - or on those things that made me fall in love in the first place. On the days when our conversations seem dominated by the logistics of our lives, I can choose to put on a song from the playlists we used to make each other. I can choose to ask her to dance.

That’s what I’m doing here today in Brooklyn, I’m choosing love. And in the rattling of the subway, the yellow of the Staten Island Ferry cutting across the grey harbour, even the crunch of the bialy, I feel something awakening inside. Something I was afraid I’d lost for good.

Like all great love stories, falling in love with New York meant falling in love with myself - I found the best version of myself, right here. It turns out that love isn’t something you earn, or hoard, it’s something you give away. New York has given and given and given to me. And now, even when it’s not easy, it’s my turn to give back.

Staying The Distance

5 minute read

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