Choosing to Stay in NYC, and Moving On

“It takes hope to stay in something that is much less than perfect. It takes courage to have hope.”

Photo by Janelle Pol

The first week in our apartment on 91st Street, my husband and I were coming back from the grocery store and an older man stopped us on 92nd. He was looking for a bank and when we told him we had just moved here and couldn’t be much help, his eyes grew wide with enthusiasm and he said, “Ask me anything!” Unimaginatively, I asked, “What is the best thing about living here?” He replied, with shining eyes, “When the lights go down and the curtain goes up and the orchestra begins to play.” I couldn’t argue, for that was why I had come. 

But why I came and why I’m staying don't really seem to be in the same realm anymore. They no longer inhabit the same space in my brain. Why I came is far away, melting into our 2019 move and another world altogether. 

There were a few moments, late in the summer of moving to New York, when I remember a panic coming over me. Not because I got on the wrong train or stepped in front of a cab, but because, in a moment of doubt, I feared the shine was wearing off and maybe we made the wrong choice. I couldn’t let this city lose its shine so soon. We had so much to do together. But eight months later, the shine would slip off the city without so much as a touch, as it settled into the deep sleep of quarantine. 

CONSIDERING LEAVING

“How do you like New York?” people asked me with excitement that summer. Sometime last spring (2020) that became, with skepticism, “Are you going to stay?” I don’t get asked the first question very much anymore, and if I do, the answer is something like, “It’s hard right now,” or “I loved it before...everything.” It’s hard to remember “before everything.” It’s just as difficult to imagine an after everything. There is a post 9-11 world. The post COVID world was beyond my range of vision at the time, and in May most of the “30 days to stop the spread” optimism disappeared as my husband and I faced the question that so many in this city would answer, one way or the other. Perhaps some of those people had a lease expiring, or perhaps they didn’t. We were the former, and it was unfathomable to me that after just a year we were considering leaving. We had always said we would take stock at the 2-3 year mark to review and assess the situation. But we found ourselves looking at an impossible situation.

I’d like to say it never crossed my mind, that I was one of the people for whom it was out of the question. I’ll never leave, this is my home! But home hadn’t quite sunk in yet. When we were able to leave this island and visit suburban areas where our families live, where things seemed ridiculously easy, far away from high population density, the idea of leaving crossed and then took up residence in the forefront of my mind for several weeks. 

I recently watched Pretend it’s a City on Netflix – Fran Lebowitz and Scorsese’s standup-docu-nostalgia-inducing miniseries. Fran says at one point, “When you are visiting somewhere else, you just can’t get over the ease of daily life. Everything in New York is like the Ring Cycle!” I feel that is an accurate description...pre-pandemic. A lockdown on top of it, bordered on impossible.

There are countless essays on “Why I left New York.” It’s the thing to write, the thing to do, the sentimental take on a place that can only be home for so long...right? But in 2020, I began to see essays on staying. There was Jerry Seinfeld’s harsh and passionate defense of the city in response to someone’s doomsday exit. Sarah Jessica Parker’s plea for the arts on behalf of many struggling artists, and early on in the pandemic, one woman’s sentiment: “I’m here in my poor broken city...I’m here and I'm not leaving.” I realized I would need to form my own defense, plea, or reason for staying, because people would want to know why. I would need to form my own, because I would need to know why.

THE WEIGHT OF A CHOICE

Life is made up of choices like these and often they come down to a question of yes or no, stay or go. Sometimes it is overwhelmingly clear and sometimes not, and often I’m not sure there is a truly wrong answer (apart from a moral decision). While we deemed it right for us to stay, it would not have been wrong to leave, and I have no less regard for those who chose to do so.

Rather than looking for some meaning in the choice to stay, there has to be an understanding that the choice to leave would have been no less noble, no more “wrong.” People make choices for so many reasons. We end relationships for good reasons and keep them going for just as reasonable ones. We move or don't move. We change jobs; we settle in for the long haul of a career. We choose one university over another and meet our best friend and husband as a result. How do we explain that? How could any other choice have been right? But I think it could have been. 

Had we chosen to leave, that which is at work in my life would continue; providence would play on, the lessons and growth would come just the same. As someone who has trouble making decisions, this has been a difficult lesson to learn. Big life decisions weigh heavily on me, whether leaving a job or changing cities. As I write this I have just made a major job decision, and even now am fearful of having made the wrong choice. I have probably made some in my life. But it’s hard to tell because when I look back, I see small miracles and links and people and places that seem right where they are meant to be, in a kind of inevitable story. As Sondheim wrote for his struggling and indecisive artist in his musical, Sunday in the Park with George, “The choice may have been mistaken. The choosing was not; move on.”

STILL A RICH CITY

Some people tell me everyone’s leaving; other people tell me they are coming back, and the city will be full of life again. One year later, waiting for the trees to earn their buds and the vaccines to serve their purpose, I have hope that the “after everything” will still be life itself. There are days when I’m not sure things will go back to normal and New York will be “as it was.” It takes hope to stay in something that is much less than perfect. It takes courage to have hope. But the life here continues, even without the shine and without the reasons I had come. 

Someone helps the woman struggling with the stroller in the snow. A couple walks hand in hand and kisses goodbye. A woman drops her magazine and a man calls after her, picking it up for her. The super finds the package that our neighbor’s movers mistakenly took to her new apartment, and returns it to us. The cherry trees in Central Park effortlessly move from bare to pink to green to orange. Serendipitous meetings occur at the bus stop. The train travels to and from Coney Island many times each day. You find the most beautiful street you’ve never seen before, and then realize it was one you were on a year ago, only now you can orient yourself. 

I used to try and remember those first few hot weeks in June and July when everything was shiny. But I don’t need to anymore. Without the shine the city is still rich, and begins to feel like home. As why I came and why I stay drift further apart, I recognize the difference: what the man on 92nd Street said, and the man on 92nd Street himself. 

Did you decide to stay? Did you decide to leave? How do you navigate big decisions, move on, and find peace?