Mythical City

This post was republished from the archive of my previous blog as a means of record-keeping. To read SaraEileen.com from the beginning of the site’s history, start here.

Everywhere I go in Sydney, I see New York.

It’s not just that all cities share bits of skyline and street, although there are pieces of Sydney, corners in Chinatown or alleyways in the CBD, that ring of the other Chinatown, of Wall Street, of the Lower East Side. It’s not just that I’m homesick, although I am. Painfully, like things are ripping where they shouldn’t.

It’s that I’d forgotten, as I suspect all New Yorkers forget, just what our city looks like to the rest of the world. The glamour and complexity, that feeling of being the center of the world. Of being a destination. Coveted. Daydreamed. When I introduced myself in one of my classes as from New York, I heard actual gasps. I have lost count of how many young folks here are wearing New York t-shirts, and of how many times I’ve seen New York vacations advertised, and of how many people have told me they’d “love to go there one day.”

That was me, once. I remember how enormous the city was when I moved there. I remember thinking I could plunge into it and be lost forever. I never really learned how to navigate exactly, but eventually I grew used to being lost again, found again, lost, found, from street to street. I remember the first time I got on the 2 instead of the 1 and ended up in Harlem, and couldn’t get back because I didn’t have change for the buses, didn’t know the subway lines. I remember being obsessed with the way the sidewalks glittered. I remember the little-known reason I went to school in New York: to see shows on Broadway.

I remember the first time I felt like I lived there, that surreal, frozen moment when I leaned out my window to see the smoke pouring from the gap in the skyline, 10 am on my fifth day of classes.

From the outside New York is all wrapped up in smoke and mirrored sheen. It glimmers; in the minds of the world it is practically shellacked. The New York I know isn’t that mythical construct of neon lights and ultra-urban America. It’s much simpler and infinitely more welcoming.

I have to wonder which of those two cities is still real to me, or if living outside the bubble will force me to mix the two ideas up in my head, to create a New New York. Glamorous bodegas, glittering side streets, a pithy, mishmashed mess. Maybe it is just the homesickness. Acute nostalgia brought about by tshirt logos and misconceptions. I don’t know.

I miss New York.