Stepping off the train at Penn Station was a shock. It was also sort of comforting.
I’m always a little scared before going to New York. That’s why I haven’t been back much since leaving a good few years back. I imagine it’s akin to an especially seductive drug that you don’t want to get hooked on again. Writer Zadie Smith put it best, in a now-seminal 2014 essay for, when she wrote of Manhattan: “You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality.
The goings-on of the subway were also reassuringly familiar: a businessman barking something about a deal like a bit player in a musical; a garbled announcement about how everything is undergoing maintenance and nothing is working; rats picking at abandoned pepperoni pizza slices on the tracks, working just as hard at their jobs as any of the city’s many investment bankers.
And yet, for all these eccentricities and despite the fact that COVID struck the city harder than anywhere else in the US, New York remains a place where a lot of people want to live. “Manhattan is full up,” sighed a friend who had been looking for an apartment for many months to no avail. The supply is so tight, especially for young people with expansive dreams and negligible furniture, that there is talk of bidding wars to rent one-bedroom apartments.
My final social commitment was with two visiting Australians. One had never been to the US before and spoke with a wide-eyed enthusiasm about how much he loved it here – the diversity, the energy, the bigness of it all. I had to concede that, for all my trepidation, there remains something magical about New York City.
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