Summer In the City--And You're Long Gone from This City

Whatever it is in New York at the moment, it is far from summer. But this line from Regina Spektor’s song “Summer in the City” totally captures my mood lately. I’ve lived in small towns and big cities alike—and sometimes, living in a big city is lonelier.

My boyfriend lives in Europe. And while I have a lot of great friends in New York, I also have a lot of close friends and family live at least several states away, at most an ocean away. Sometimes I’m too busy to think about it—too busy to think, period. But other times I feel the absence of people I love. I wish I could drop in on my parents for some wine and a home-cooked meal. I wish I could meet my sister for an all-afternoon-long lunch-turned-shopping spree. I wish I could drink margaritas with my best friends from college on the roof of a hotel, several times a month. I wish I could come home to my boyfriend.

Being lonely in New York—I suspect any big city, but I’ve felt it the most here—is different than being lonely in a small town. In New York, you are constantly presented with reminders of your own aloneness. You take your laptop to do some work in the park, and there are dozens of people nearby—groups of friends, couples, all happy people reinforcing the fact that you are alone. You go to a party where you don’t know a lot of people; you get into some awkward conversations with groups of people who’d rather be hanging out with their friends. You regularly rub shoulders in the subway with people who ignore you and everyone else.

I don’t hear a lot of noise from my neighbors in my apartment building. Except when I’m in the bathtub. For some reason, right in that spot, the acoustics align and I hear someone snoring on the other side of the wall; salsa music coming in from below; the sounds of a noisy family dinner off to the right. I’m reminded of how strange and artificially isolating apartment living is. We all live right on top of each other, isolated by thin sheetrock walls into our own, distinct little boxes. What if the walls came down? What if I could see my neighbors on one side having dinner, my neighbors on the other having a fight? Would we blink and stare and then try to get to know each other—or try to ignore each other even more willfully than before?

Being around other people as much as you are in New York is exhausting. Subways are crowded and dirty. There is never a seat at the Starbucks. There is always someone on the sidewalk who wants something from you—a signature for a petition, a donation, some small change. I understand the desire to wall it all off, to come home to a place where you can block out all the millions of strangers you are surrounded by every day. But even when you come home, you are surrounded. And still, somehow, alone.

My boyfriend came to visit me for Christmas. We spent three weeks together--and then I dropped him off at the airport and let him fly away. For the past two weeks since, I've been carrying his absence with me, a low ache below my rib cage. It's made me want to stay in; being alone in my apartment is somehow less lonely than being out in the anonymous crowds. It'll get smaller as the days go by, until eventually I won't feel it at all. I'll be too busy, too engrossed in my own life. But for now, I'm glad I feel it. I'm glad I don't take him for granted.




How it Is For Me Now

I am never so alone as I am in
A crowded room, where
Everyone already knows each other
And the conversations have no doorways.

On the sofa, my body makes a shape
That doesn’t fit me, a jagged hieroglyph
leaning towards exit.

This city is a veinwork of canyons
Where people live precarious,
Trees clinging to polished glass cliff faces.

A terrible wind stalks the buildings,
Howling pigeons into flight
Their wings stretched taut as drumskin.

My street is a patchwork of potholes
Full of strange rainwater.
The man on the corner purses his lips at me,

Calls me beautiful
A ghost in his face that I recognize.
I am alone here.

On the days when the loneliness unribbons
In my gut like a long black highway
I forget how to live in a city
that’s empty of you.

I forget to believe what I gave up to be here
Was worth it. Was enough.