“HATING BROOKLYN”
Joan Yang
Do you think of me still every day?
I know I do. Think of you, I mean.
Today I wondered if you got up and showered and meditated
or maybe you were more dreading work and played video games for 2 hours in the
morning. The bottom line being, you still got up in the morning: woke up to
your alarm, set the night before for a realistic 9 AM, because New Yorkers are
realists, and workaholics, and even if it unfolds in a morning where in order
to face the day at the onset and push
back that feeling of knowing how bleak things really are, that constant scratch
at the back of your throat and against your tongue that tastes like acid and
rot, you have to use some brief escapism in the form of button-mashing at a
small screen of incredibly stimulating glitchy colors and graphics, you did
your due part and woke up at the right time, at the right place, ready to go
after several hours.
I woke up
today in a small room without a window, in a railroad-style apartment off the
corner of Franklin and Prospect. I live right next door to a cheap Chinese
takeaway place whose fried chicken plate I’m still curious about. I’ve paid 650
a month for this room, for two years. I slept in it maybe twice in that time.
I’ve lived two lives and sometimes had two of everything but I haven’t even
tried that fucking Chinese place.
You hated
trying new places, which many a 15-year old’s astrology-themed Tumblr told me
was surmountable to being a Cancer man. And, jokingly, despite the incongruity
of your own outwardly ambiguous ethnic makeup and relative youth and
disposition towards good light in an apartment without having to pay rent the
rough equivalent of a black market vital organ, you always repeated how much
you hated Brooklyn, refused to move
to Brooklyn, would never live there,
you don’t want to get SHOT AT AFTER ALL (and note: this has to be read or said
to oneself with the utmost dryness in tone and also respect to aforementioned
ethnic makeup, or else you might want to throw a chair or dirty sock, like I
did) and if I wanted to come see you I would be able to find you just fine
right here in Manhattan.
Nobody
lives in Manhattan under the age of 30 unless they’re coming from the American Psycho model of Wall Street
bro, I told him.
You
shrugged and, disentangling yourself by about 40% from the cuddle jungle,
resumed working on your laptop.
The
silence as a response unsettled me. I did live in Manhattan, kind of-sort of
but not technically, but only through you. And I hated the feeling in the back
of my head that I had to keep pushing down, about how unaccomplished I felt (and feel constantly still; because that
stuff never really goes away especially when you’re raised in a
first-generation immigrant home of thrifty Koreans who grew up under the trauma
of their parents’ remembrance of wars and occupations and America Saving the
Day, and an outlier of a particularly Catholic and unaffectionate mother who,
having never received sympathy or empathy for her own artistic endeavors and
fantasies, was not keen nor equipped to dole such things out to her children). You came from a much poorer background
than me, somewhere deep in Philadelphia; I was raised in whitewashed suburbs
and just daydreamed for years and years, until a rude awakening came in the
form of my mother killing herself and jerking myself awake, but also killing
any hope for imagination for years to come. (I’m still waiting for it come back.
But at least now I’m working on it. I’m trying my best.) You worked very, very
hard, had to, to get to where you
are, and I think you might still be struggling with all of the silent truths
and injustices behind that. I just ran away.
I ran
away to New York, to run away from my father’s terrible sadness that would have
no relief or end, to run away from a string of infatuated men slash sadboys
that I suddenly, as a late-blooming 20-something, found myself entrapped in and
with no idea on how to proceed, to run away from what seemed to be an endless
routine of school and art that I frankly felt nothing for anymore and from
working in a coffee shop to * ・゚✧pursue my dreams ✧*・ (or a whim).
And by
running away every so often from Manhattan and that scary feeling of
unworthiness and alienation and that enormous invisible gap that seemed to
always loom between us (if only because I put it there myself, and fashioned
the braces, and tightened the bolts), I found refuge in Brooklyn. I still
worked at a coffee shop. But I loved the people there, the feeling of, and I
hate that it feels cheesy to say but yes, community,
that I had never been able to find in the enormous expanse that is northern
California (and even less so in the increasingly overpopulated strip of Silicon
Valley that continues to do its best to push us all out), the fact that I was
sat in a small shop tucked into the corner of a residential tree-lined
neighborhood and every morning I said hello to these people until eventually
they asked me what I want to do and I would shrug, not SO comfortable and
Brooklyn-initiated enough yet to be wholly honest, but reply cheerfully ‘I
don’t know, but my boyfriend makes like way too much money but also hates his
job and himself so I guess not computer engineering?’
But in
the end people move away and move on; the sweet youngish couple (a half-caff
soy latte and a no-nonsense cappuccino) with their newborn confess their need
for a lawn and more sunshine, which is apparently to be found in L.A. and
definitely not in a 500-square foot studio that, despite its stylishness, is
still constantly on the defense from black mold outbreaks; neighborhoods shift and expand, brownstones
get ripped up for modernized condos, and others get zoned for historic
preservation. (They’re such beautiful old buildings.) I left, to work in
publishing and actually make less money after taxes and PURSUE MY DREAMS (and
whims) and maybe even to start drawing and writing again and be able to feel
anything inside of myself that might still be remaining there after loss and
childish loneliness and untreated trauma, anything of my old dreamy self with
too much imagination and not a dearth, instead of the constant squeeze on the
under cage of my ribs, that painful mixture of panic and fear at my own
uninhibited sadness.
We’re all
in Brooklyn, trying to write and draw and sing and act, carving out a small
nook for ourselves in an already overcrowded city, trying to find our people,
build our communities. I have found more in Brooklyn than I have ever found
anywhere else. But I’ve also found loss, having tried to forget it, and
relearned it; and newly learned that loss takes on more forms than one, and
where is your home if you’ve always put it in a person and that person is too
scared to move to Brooklyn or tell people at work that they’re not actually
white or be able to say or just grasp at the multitude of intangible things that are torturing them, those things
that keep growing and growing as every day a new report of a gunman shooting up
a club bores holes through our eye skull retinas and the government’s response
is to have the president shout and then a cop kills a man for standing about
minding his business and being black and the president just shouts louder until
you can’t even hear yourself think
I wonder if you’ve put up those linen
curtains I recommended, the ones in the sandy beige tone.
You always did like your taupe hues.
I’ve started working weekends at a coffee shop, to keep my
mind busy, to keep my body active, to do literally anything including spilling
coffee grounds and various varieties of steamed nut milk all over my shoes and
clothes for hours on end, just to not have to think about you and your beige
apartment and your smile when you looked at me so intently and deeply when we
lied next to each other at night and how much it hurts still.
Also, I
missed getting free coffee.
Honestly, the most Brooklyn thing about me is that I
worked at a coffee shop for almost three years. That’s really it. I am so
thoroughly Californian, in ways not apparent to myself, and am constantly
reminded of it by strangers and coworkers and by my own wistfulness walking in
the muddy grey slush-and-trash soup canvassing the street up and down Nostrand
in the dead of February, enchanted by the presence of snow.
I am not
yet jaded, I tell myself.
Just
terribly heartbroken.
We were
cuddling on the couch, trying to find ways to tangle more in each other and
maximize warmth and efficiency in surface area grazing. Something in between
MMA wrestling and low-intensity low-impact pilates. Weird and soft large
rodents, turning and twisting until legs became locked branches and an arm was
braced underneath the expanse of a back and up over the other shoulder and I
would move from my favorite spot (burying my face into your chest, doing my
best squirrel impression in order to burrow into it and create that space for
myself, where your heart should be) to the other cold shoulder.
You
paused at one point, coming up for breath from your spot buried in either a
nook in my clavicle or armpit (definitely my least favorite) and studied my
face intently to establish the recognition of an Important Thing you were about
to Say.
“Can I
tell you a secret?” You whispered, coyly, the ends of your lips slightly
upturned like it was a joke (and it almost always was). The snowfall outside
was light but caught by the wind tunnel traps of the high-rise buildings
surrounding us, in this strange and severe glass and steel box high up in lower
Manhattan. It looked like a blizzard outside to my untrained west coast eye and so I felt a chill go up my
spine and snuggled closer.
To hear better.
“I don’t
actually hate Brooklyn.”
Today I wonder if it will be the day you write me and call
me and say everything is going to be ok, I understand things more clearly now
and myself and you and us and I think we should be together because it feels
right and we can do it better this time
I don't cry anymore unless i almost force myself to, like
sometimes if i need a reprieve from feeling not really any way about anyone or
thing and can remember this thing i have lost and can still mourn
it's sad isn't it? but i am still trying very hard, harder
than before
i'd like you to be proud of me, but
I’ll do it whether you are or aren’t.
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