Big-City Blues

I am the kind of person who believes her life should always be underscored by music. So late at night my fourth day in college, burnt out from having the same conversations (“What’s your name?” “Where are you from?” “We should grab lunch sometime!”), and desperate for some reminder of home, I climbed out onto my dorm room fire escape and searched Spotify for “songs about New York City.” I chose the first playlist that came up and hit shuffle.

You know that Frank Sinatra song, “New York, New York”? You hear it every New Year’s when you watch the ball drop in Times Square. That’s the first song that came up in this quintessentially New York City playlist, and I didn’t even make it past the first verse before I pressed pause. “Start spreading the news,” Sinatra croons, “I’m leaving today. I want to be a part of it, New York, New York.”

The New York City Sinatra describes — a place where your “little town blues are melting away” — is not the one I know. The New York I know is not glamorous. It is not Taylor Swift’s “kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats under coats” or Alicia Keys’ “concrete jungle where dreams are made of.” The New York I know is gritty and mean, and not in the romantic way songs like to describe. It is too loud when you need quiet, and too quiet when you need loud.

But most importantly, New York is a place that knows me too well, and that I know too well. It’s cafes that have seen me through heartbreak and parking lots that have listened to me fight with my mom. It’s city block corners that know my secrets and parks that have heard me cry.

My senior year of high school, I didn’t apply to a single college within a two-hour radius of home. I didn’t know where I was going to go — Boston or Los Angeles or maybe some small town in the middle of nowhere — but I knew I had to get out. Somewhere along the way, the concrete jungle started to feel more like a cage. The kaleidoscope looked more like pieces of shattered glass, colors once bright turned dull. I had big-city blues, and not the scrappy, aspirational melancholy New York is famous for. It’s not even like I have any terrible memories tied to New York. I belonged there, but by the time senior year rolled around, I was starting to think that maybe I belonged too much. In a city where everything is meant to be exciting, I had slipped into everyday monotony. An overdose of belonging, I realized, paradoxically results in agitation, discomfort, and a desire to leave.

New York City is a place people long to escape to, but it’s the place I needed to escape from.

I noticed two things about Cambridge when I first got here: The streets are a maze, and I can see too much of the sky. New York locks its streets into grids, and it sealed me into a version of myself I was growing too big for. There, smog suffocates a skyscraper-filled sky. For all we mock the “transformative experience” Harvard promises, I can’t help but think that maybe, the simple act of being here, where you can get lost in a tangle of streets and see an errant star at night, is transformative in itself.

In only two months, Cambridge has changed me. That change will come with a price: When I step off the Amtrak at Penn Station this Thanksgiving, I won’t feel the same way as last time I was there. I will take the same trains, but the routes will feel a little less intuitive. I won’t know quite where to stand on the platform so I get off right by the 94th Street exit. My favorite bench will be taken up by a transplant from Connecticut who sees the city in a way I never could. My childhood bed will be a little too soft.

If my life is lived to the beat of a Spotify playlist, maybe a better soundtrack is Noah Kahan’s “The View Between Villages.” In it, he sings: “Feel the rush of my blood, I’m 17 again, I am not scared of death, I’ve got dreams again.” Though college is supposed to be about growing up, I can’t help but feel like I’m moving backward in years. Being here makes me hopeful for the future in a way I wasn’t in New York — like the wide-open sky is a blank canvas on which any number of paintings can appear. Though I come from a city built on its inhabitants’ dreams, it was only by leaving that I could see mine clearly.

In the weeks leading up to Aug. 28, I could never have imagined that I would actually miss New York City. And yet, not even a week in, I found myself searching desperately for a reminder of the place I still call home. Almost two months later, I’m asking my mom to send me pictures of the view from our rooftop garden.

The point of all of this, then, is not that I hate New York City, or that I never want to return. In fact, I miss it terribly — that’s why I went out on the fire escape that night. In some ways, I miss New York the way I miss my elementary school best friend: I don’t speak to him anymore, but I see him every few months via an Instagram post and feel a pang of fondness and nostalgia. When I see New York again, we’ll reacquaint ourselves. I’ll tell the corners that used to know my secrets a few new ones. And then we’ll say goodbye, and I’ll be on a train north — missing home, but glad, for now, that I left.

Way further down the line, there is, of course, the very real possibility that I will be part of the quarter of my graduating class that moves to New York post-Harvard. Maybe if I return for good after four years spent away, I’ll see my hometown with fresh eyes instead of weary ones. New York and I grew up together, but we’ll spend the next four years growing apart. Maybe once we do, and when I’m running toward it instead of away, New York will feel like a place to grow into. Maybe I’ll “make a brand-new start of it, in old New York.”