My Tale of Two Cities

by Lindsay Harvey (United States of America)

A leap into the unknown USA

It wasn’t boredom that made me choose to move from London to New York, it was a combination of the usual factors that make a person feel restless; a stagnant career, a dwindling relationship, a general feeling of malaise. I moved with no job, nowhere to live, and no friends but somehow any apprehension was preferable to the creeping melancholy that came with staying in one place. My first few days and weeks passed by in a blur, punctuated by quintessential New York moments; the man urinating in the elevator when I arrived, disheveled and bewildered, at JFK, the woman walking nine pug dogs around the reservoir in Central Park, brawling basketball players at the courts by West 4th Street. New York has been written about endlessly. And I certainly cannot pretend to have anything to add to the myriad elegant prose that tackle the unenviable but wonderful task of describing this fiercely singular city. Its omnipresence in films and books meant that it was familiar to me even before I arrived. And of course completely alien at the same time. In my first few months I got on the wrong Subway train more times than I got on the right one. Time zones and bureaucratic differences between the UK and the US were the source of endless frustrated tears. I was lonely all the time, my senses heightened by the barrage of unfamiliarity. But for every bad experience there was a good one. One particularly miserable night early on, I looked up at the jagged beauty of the Financial District, and at the countless fragments of expensive sky above me, and felt a renewed hope. I echo innumerable writers and artists when I say that this city holds an almost dizzying sense of opportunity. I have lived in New York for just over two years, and while I feel incredibly strongly about it, somehow this strength of feeling is neither love nor hate, merely an ardent respect. Respect for its bewildering energy and ferocious loyalty of the people that could never live anywhere else. East Coast seasons are magnetic, and since living here I have immersed myself in all the cliches the city has to offer. Winters are freezing but often beautiful. Midtown skyscrapers are stark against blazing blue skies, commuters trudge, heads down, through grey, icy quagmires that were once snow, tourists exclaim about the cold as they pile into steaming Chinatown restaurants, and uptown doormen blow on their fingers, and move up and down on the balls of their feet. In the summer, everyone is sweaty and happy. Bars spill out onto already busy streets, Wall Street workers sweat through their suits on Subway platforms, AC units drip onto the streets below, tinny music and the smell of outdoor cooking accompany block parties that last long into the night, and the El train tracks cast dappled shadows down endless Brooklyn thoroughfares. Moving cities, whichever way you look at, is a pretty profound experience. I think and react differently; my beliefs, language and priorities have changed, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes overtly. Some relationships have grown and flourished, for others, the distance has grown too far to bridge. I am changed beyond saying ‘trash’ instead of ‘rubbish’, ‘sidewalk’ instead of ‘pavement’. Every day I walk the invisible line between feeling like I have lived here for a few days or a few decades. I have two passports, but the concept of ‘home’ is becoming more and more nebulous. Memories of London are fondly fuzzy. Houses and streets and pubs and parties are pleasantly blurred, forming a giant ball of nostalgia that hovers permanently somewhere near my solar plexus. I miss the cobbled mews, its unexpected ancient churches, incongruous amid towering glass-covered office blocks, and its plentiful green spaces. But goodbyes have gotten easier over the last couple of years. I have come to accept that everything is transient and that it is quite possible that I will be missing New York in the very same way some time in the not too distant future.