New York has a way of getting under your skin. I first visited in 2008 with my brother, Angus. Actually, that’s a lie, I came through New York in 2005 when I was coming back from Australia on my gap year. I landed in March with a suitcase full of clothes suitable for an Australian summer. The temperature in New York was hovering around zero.
I walked from the 14th Street subway down the Bowery to the White House Hotel of New York which was two floors of single occupancy bedrooms – really nothing more than plywood walls as wide as a double bed that didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling and a single, flimsy mattress bed – I should have realised at the time it was a halfway house (there were men drinking cans of lager in the lobby) but I was nineteen years old and naive and thought I was on a great Kerouac adventure.
In the morning, while getting a coffee from a street stall, a middle-aged woman hustled me into Gap and insisted on buying me a coat “I hate to see somebody so cold,” she said, as she paid. “You remind me of my son.”
Possibly she thought I was also homeless. I had been living on a diet of almost exclusively baked beans and beer in Australia, and the thin t-shirt I wore likely didn’t cover up my skinny frame. In 2008, I went back to New York with Angus and then in 2014 I moved there with my wife when I was 27 years old.
Now, over 10 years later, it seems we were impossibly young when we moved there. We stayed for four years. I miss it everyday. But I also miss being in my late-20s. The two are, possibly, interrelated. New York has a way of becoming part of your identity. I loved telling people I lived in New York. I loved being seen for not just living in London and working in advertising.
As Jenna Park writes, if and when you leave, there’s a part of you that never does. Maybe that’s why it hurts so much because it stays in your heart as a certain version of yourself that exists nowhere else.
Anyway, this is a song by JW Francis about New York that captures the wistful melancholy I always feel at this time of year.
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