to a struggling young person of color in godforsaken, covid-time new york 

i’ve noticed a pattern in the books i read lately. they’re all about struggling young people – of color, specifically. and all set in new york. which is quite the coincidence since i – me – am in fact a struggling young person of color in godforsaken, covid-time new york.

mom says i do it to myself. i’m a sucker for punishment, i like being sad. okay, i see that. i chose medical school, a two-faced siren that dangles dreams of future fulfillment while siphoning away your money, your sanity, your soul. today, i did practice questions on the subway. the subway! i can’t even totter on the grimy orange seats of the 6 without thinking, “damn, i should be studying.” as if it were truly a frivolous indulgence to shuffle past someone vomiting on the tracks at spring street. 

see, if new york didn’t actually exist, no one could imagine it. like an unethical social experiment: what happens if you sardine eight-and-a-half million people into three hundred square miles of cold island? stay tuned, a survivor with stockholm syndrome will somehow make snow-trash cesspools on the sidewalk and sky-high rent sound charming.

of course there are beautiful things about new york. but there are also beautiful things about every other place. and i wonder if the beautiful parts of new york look more beautiful to us because they are inaccessible. i can walk to carl schurz park, i can taste its name and toss it familiarly from my tongue, but i will never be an estate-rich white lady who can perch on a bench along the river and read there every summer evening. i can only pretend. i’m closer to a tourist living out the movie of new york for a day. except more pathetic because i’ve been in this movie every day, always with the main characters in my peripheral vision, always subliminally envious – and insidiously more dissatisfied and defeated with time.

or maybe the beautiful parts of new york look more beautiful because the rest of it is so shitty. like when you’re starving and food, no matter what it is, tastes the best it ever has. of course central park is an oasis when you live in a smoggy concrete zoo. and maybe we take perverse pride in surviving the unlivable, and we feel “resilient” and superior, and we want our rewards to be worth it, so our minds make them so. collectively, we hype up the dumbest Ws, like joe’s pizza (which some would argue, at $4 a slice, is an L).

i love new york too, even if it’s just the stockholm talking, or maybe the driver’s license-less glutton in me with so many restaurants just a hop, skip, and a jump away (quite literally sometimes). but especially during this pandemic, new york has been depressingly stoic and lonely. it’s taken the Ws away, i think, the glitz and glam. no more flurrying into weekday night film screenings or string quartets at cathedrals as a cultured friend’s plus one. no more being led to the “best ramen in new york” by multiple people to multiple restaurants. and no more shared “new yorker”-ness either. no more collective mad dash for coffee when granted the tiniest two-minute reprieve from lecture. no more “come on”-ing or being “come on”-ed jaywalking before the light turns. only the solitary. the continued unlivable minus the togetherness.

in spring 2020, living by the hospital, i’d hear pots banging and airhorns blasting at 7pm each night. i even saw it once, when i was volunteering in astoria: cars lined up outside the hospital front, drivers honking and passengers standing through sunroofs screaming. i wonder how those people are doing now. if their spirit has persisted. or if they lie in bed with the curtains closed in the mid-afternoon, the drone of zoom a constant lullaby bringing restless sleep-wake. if the thought flits by in their heads that they’ve really only been existing in texts and emails and how easy it would be to disappear in the mountains of unreads.

i’m still confused about my place here, i think – in new york and the world. in the time i’m supposed to be finding purpose, finding love, finding myself – i think i’m barely living, barely breathing, barely remembering my name. the city swallows me; sometimes that feels like a hug, sometimes it’s suffocating. what lends substance to my existence, i think, are the books i’ve been reading, the characters holding mirrors to my face: the young people of color dropping street names and subway lines, tangled with infatuation, resolve, desolation, and envy, in books set in new york.