Hey NYC,
Hello. I am not writing to you from New York, I am sitting on a couch in rural Pennsylvania, but yesterday morning I woke up to a cacophony of sound outside my East Harlem apartment. My heart is with you even when I am not, as cliché as that sounds.
All my dreams are with you, all my illusions, all my misconceptions and my supreme and sublime sense of freedom.
It all lives down your avenues, atop your skyscrapers and pulsing from lights on your bridges.
I remember explicitly some perfect moments: I am cross faded walking down an East Village street in the snow last year, I’ve just spent the day wearing a Santa Clause hat, drinking beer and smoking weed with new friends. I’m on the way to a party at a gay bar for my basketball league and the snow is in flurries around me, igniting the streetlights pouring down above my head.
I’m hungry, and I spot a taco place. I’d never been there before and if I went there again I probably wouldn’t even know. I order some tacos and sit alone amongst strangers, who are also sitting alone. I pull out my book and start to read in a restaurant full of people who are also reading and eating tacos. The snow is a carnival of light outside the windows, and young drunk people in santa hats are flowing past and down the street. The sense of freedom that surges through me in this moment is almost too much to take.
I feel this same freedom, a tornado in my chest, six months later as I’m again alone, trudging uptown under streetlights on the East Side. I’ve just had dinner with camp friends at Veselka, a Ukrainian restaurant, and I’ve spent the whole evening chatting and laughing with a girl named Liz. One of my friends brought her to dinner and I’m swirled inside serendipity, imagining Liz’s eyes and her sympathetic laugh, like she understood me completely and had known me always. Liz and I will eventually date, and she’ll eventually dump me, but for now I’m unaware of impending catastrophe.
I’m simply fluttering in a current of possibility, counting your shining streets, music surging in my ears. You look so perfect right now, New York.
The lights shining from the windows in your buildings matches the lights shining in my chest, your surging energy sweeps inside me and mirrors a love so intense it's almost painful. The lights from your buildings sparkle on your rivers. This love rocking in my chest is for you. Suddenly it's raining and I’m in line for a bar, waiting to get inside for my friend’s birthday party. You look like you emerged from my memory in this moment, NYC. You look just like all my dreams.
,I’ll never forget the morning I showed up at my magazine internship in Soho to see AM Homes, one of my favorite authors, casually sitting at a table in the conference room. I’ll never forget the party for the same internship when I met Salman Rushdie and told him I appreciated all he’d done. I’ll never forget the euphoria of having marijuana delivered right to my apartment for the first time, nor will I forget drinking whiskey and watching my radiant professor Catherine Chung read a passage from her new book at KGB Bar.
All these memories are pressed against glass, preserved in my mind.
There are times you’ve broken my heart, New York City, I think I can tell you this now. Sometimes, when I wake up hung over with an empty bank account, I hate you a little bit. I hate how many people sleep on boxes besides your streets, how many people are deprived of food and showers and medical care.
I hate Penn Station, I really do, it smells like pee and it’s dirty and filled with drunk people and is basically where happiness goes to die. I hate how often I’m afraid of getting raped on your streets at night, how some men think it’s okay to yell things at me. I’m still mad at you for the time my sister got sexually assaulted on the subway and how my professor fell through one of the doors on the street.
I love your rivers, though, and your parks. I love how you know art is essential to existence, how you have a Center for Fiction and a Poets House and a Nuyorican Poets Café and so many more artistic outlets.
I love your coffee shops with couches and lights and music. I love how I can go to a bar alone and fall in love for a night, how I can have a wild time on any day of the week, how you’re always thrumming with opportunity. With opportunity comes hope.
I’ve worked for Seeds of Peace and PEN America, and they’re both working ceaselessly for a better future, and you’re their home-- along with countless other nonprofit organizations filled with genuine, beautiful people who devote their lives to making the future better for others. You seem to foster that sort of empathy, that sort of hope, the kind light that can send a smile across the world. I'm proud to call you my home.
I don’t know if we’ll live together forever New York City. But for now, you’re perfect.
With love, hope, and a lot of other complicated emotions,
Sara Sherr
If you enjoyed this article, check out An Open Letter to My Past Lovers and Sexual Exploits in NYC…!