j'ai deux amours

I wrote this at 10:57am on February 4th, 2013. I was either on my way to the Schwarzman building to do research for my PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center, or on my way to classes there. Shiv and I were engaged, I had just gotten my ring, I was in full wedding planning mode, Anna and I lived together still in the East 90s, the second avenue subway construction was hammering on endlessly, and the bottom hadn't yet fallen out--but was about t in a month's time--of Shiv's family. 

The city is a hard and coarse being,

Of glass and steel and concrete

Made of what is jagged, heavy, cutting. It is hungry, demanding, always wanting more.

Sometimes i feel like a bitter, indigestible thing in the city, the base of a celery stalk, stubborn cellulose to be chewed up and spat out, incompatible with the organic process of the city.  

I'll leave, i say. I imagine gardenias on a balcony, air scented with orange blossom and hot earth, and think, let them keep their cold, their street rot, their dark tunnels. 

I would miss the sound of the man playing Dave Brubeck under the trees in the park, would miss the men at Columbus circle calling out am new york,"

I don't feel that I should change or edit those few lines in any way, because they represent a snapshot in time that deserves to be preserved, not papered over in any way. I still feel a lot of those things, but so much of my feeling about New York has changed over the years, most dramatically since the election of DT. New York is still all of the things I said before in 2013, but it is also a life raft in the middle of a vast and terrifying sea. I don't think I--we--will ever leave now. This place is filled with our people, is filled with a portrait of the america that we want to live in. And, if we are ever so lucky as to have a child, this is the city and the environment in which we want him or her to be raised. Diversity is important--essential, even--to both of us individually, to our happiness and peace of mind, and certainly to our philosophy of raising a child. I think about what the city means beyond that to me, and I think nowhere in the world will ever be able to mean as much as this one does to me. New York is the place that I found myself, is the place where I finally became myself. I did my graduate studies here and found my intellectual voice and path; I worked here and started my business here, fulfilling so many lifelong dreams in the process. I broke up with and turned down offers from so many different men and boys here: St in Columbus Circle and his bag of broken cds and dead flowers, J in front of the Strand, both Ch's, one on West 58th street and the other on E 94th in his drunken tirade, Sa more or less at Clinton Street Baking co., riding on a bus in the snow back from PA listening to Andrew Bird, Se with his camera near D's office on Lafayette, Chr and the golden egg at Astor Place, Ben and the chinese silk robe near the Fuller Building, ending an era with B at Freeman's, ignoring M in a cab at Columbus Circle when he told me to give him time, dismissing E in that old apartment in the East Village...I met Shiv at that bar on 9th avenue, then again two years later at the Steelcase building on marathon day. I knew I would love him outside of Supper as I walked up to him and saw him looking at me with his deep, quiet gaze; he drunkenly told me he loved me at 2am at Viand on 2nd avenue, he carried me on his back in two feet of snow and more falling still on a deserted Rivington, wrapped my numb and nearly frostbitten feet in his scarf at 3am at the 2nd Avenue subway stop during a blizzard; we both consciously said I love you in the Jefferson Market Garden in the spring, cherry blossoms all around us. I was mugged outside of Café d'Alsace and he comforted me. We ran into a drunken Anthony Bourdain outside of his old apartment door, when he accidentally tried to key into it. Tommy the doorman was the first person to congratulate us when we came back from our trip to France and Jamaica after we were engaged. We had our first dinner as a married couple in the city at the Ritz Diner at midnight on June 17th, 2013, and he carried me over the threshold of our little apartment on East 57th street an hour later. We met I at Maialino that very memorable day last September. I was at the gallery at the Fuller Building when I got the call from K that they had taken him away again. I discovered there was a jail just down the street from Film Forum when I visited him there. We all danced and sang and hugged and cried on Green Street when Obama won in 2008; I joined a group of strangers in Columbus Circle to sing songs and cry and run through the street with flags that same night at 1am, euphoric and dazed. I was on the newly opened Highline with Shana, on Maria's birthday when my phone buzzed telling me that Michael Jackson died, and within minutes the very air of the city was filled with his voice and people sniffling back tears. I ate bao on the lower east side with Anna, Kaveh and Shiv, who brought me an orchid, the moment after I had turned in my Masters thesis. And now we will buy our first home together on the Upper East Side.

All of those memories are here, all of those past selves are here in at every turn. My hope for our country only exists here in the city, both by its very nature, and because this is the place I lived when Obama was president, the only time in my life where I have felt hopeful and proud of our country. I moved here in the summer of 2007, he was elected in the fall of 2008, so has marked most of my life here. 

There are so many reasons why I don't think I could ever leave this place, this light in a great sea of darkness.