“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” – Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”
I visited New York City last week and joked with friends about, after spending my five days there, writing the definitive “Why I Left New York” essay. I say definitive because it’s a crowded space. In May The New York Times wrote a piece about New York’s creative classes fleeing to Los Angeles. In 2013, The Times published another piece exclusively about writers leaving the city that never sleeps.
The NYC Departure Diary is practically it’s own genre. Entire books devote themselves to the topic, like Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. Its title taken from a seminal Joan Didion essay, the collection also features the stories of 27 other women, stories of trials and tribulations and trials again in the city that never sleeps.
Here’s my New York story: At the 9/11 museum, I cried listening to a husband on Flight 175 tell his wife “it’s not looking good.” In the East Village, I ate sushi with two friends, friends I met in Austria and had never before known in the United States of America. In the West Village, I clutched a toilet seat for seven hours until the sushi was gone and I was barely able to stand, let alone make it to that night’s Dispatch concert. In Brooklyn I played shuffleboard and in Williamsburg I drank on a rooftop filled exclusively with beautiful people. I went to church in downtown Manhattan and a soccer match in Queens. I stared at a slice of pizza in Crown Heights and asked my stomach “Again?” Then I was locked out of an apartment and napped on a stranger’s couch.
Often these New York stories are about writers who follow their dreams of belletristic success to The Big Apple, only to, years later, surrender to the city’s sometimes ruthless realities: financial, professional, and social. The Goodbye Essay is a memorialization of the city, an obituary, a white flag, and maybe sometimes one last literary gasp.
My New York story was none of those things. It was just a five-day trip. I arrived healthy, in decent financial standing, having not seen a couple of long lost friends in years. I left flu-ridden, in slightly worse financial standing, having visited (read: been nursed by) a couple of long lost friends.
I didn’t make any great revelations. I didn’t try and fail; I didn’t succeed. I just spent time with friends, friends who brought me ginger ale and saltine crackers, who lent me beds and couches and the couches of their friends, who sang the words of Dispatch—“go now you are forgiven”—and “Just As I Am” with me.
In a week I fly to Europe to begin a two-year—and maybe longer—stint in Germany. If Germany is a beginning, then it’s also an end. I’m not yet sure what that end is. Either way, I’ll be lucky to find the things there that I found in New York.
Andrew Knot (’11) lives and writes in Cologne, Germany.
