Notes on nostalgia, noise, and what still feels like home.
We went home to New York this past weekend, to celebrate our tenth(!!!) wedding anniversary. Every visit back home is always a whirlwind, running all over the place to see friends and family.
The difference this time around was more downtime than usual — in the form of commuting on the subway. Sure, we’ve taken the subway in the eight years since we’ve left, but not as often as we did this past weekend. (If you are curious: Fort Greene, Harlem, Hamilton Heights, East Village, Midtown West, and a bonus PATH ride to and from Jersey City! On a weekend schedule!)
I need to sit with some of these thoughts a bit longer, because I think there are threads to pull. But I’m feeling quite tired and my brain has been scrambled eggs lately. So for now, enjoy my half-baked thoughts — more so observations than deep thoughts, really — and let me know if there are any I must expand on.
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In many ways it felt so much like home, like I haven’t missed a beat. In other ways, I felt like a stranger navigating a new place. Not because I didn’t know where to go or how to get there, but the things I was seeing and what I was feeling were… different. Which is totally fine and expected; we should all be evolving, and NYC and Jersey City are no exception!
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It made me really happy to see the Chinatown mainstays of my childhood are still alive and well. We had breakfast at Big Wong on Friday, and it’s the best congee in the world, idc what you think.
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The subway is one of the few things left that doesn’t have a premium experience you can pay for. Experiencing Disneyland with a “fast pass” vs without one are two very different experiences. Not on the subway! Everyone pays their $2.90 fare and you get what you get, whether that’s a quiet ride or jam packed with a hundred sweaty strangers. You can’t pay an extra $100 to ride the train without the sweaty strangers. And there’s something so beautiful about it being the great equalizer.
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What struck me as weird was how many subway ads were for tech companies. The friend dot com ones were especially weird, they totally creeped me out (Friend is a wearable device that, to my understanding, is an AI chatbot that lives inside a necklace? No thanks).
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Growing up in the NYC metro area taught me a kind of practical problem solving. It trained me to be more adaptable and resilient. The train I’m on is being rerouted? Gotta figure out how to adjust. There are delays and I’m smushed on a subway platform? Gotta suck it up like everyone else. There’s a thread here about how dealing with a little bit of friction isn’t the worst thing. Something about what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but like, not in a toxic way?
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Along the lines of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger or something… I realized I got desensitized to a lot of things at some point. How loud it is. How smelly it is. How generally gross it is. It was the first time since moving away that volume of the normal city sounds (sirens, cars, subway trains, jackhammering, people shouting, etc.) jarred me, and I was surprised by that. I adjusted by the end of the first evening, though.
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I don’t miss commuting. At all. Sorry. I know it would have been slightly better on a weekday and not a silly modified schedule and weekend service routes (getting around on Thursday and Friday was way better than Saturday), but the trekking through humid subway stations, dodging people and pigeons and poop, going up steep stairs because your train tracks are located in the seventh layer of hell, the people playing games on their phone at full volume without headphones, did I mention how smelly the city is…
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I confidently navigate throngs of people, the game of Frogger while crossing the street, labyrinths of transfers between subway lines. If I walk in the wrong direction, at least I do it with conviction (and subtly turn around after pulling over to the side to check my phone or tie my shoe or any other reason to stop and pivot). I find it interesting that I move through life so confidently like this in some aspects of life, but not in others. Something to marinate in my brain and untangle at a later time.
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Every time I go back to the East Coast, I think I’ll find it different — and it always is — but the bigger surprise is realizing I’m different, too. A little slower, a little softer (the number of times I wondered aloud, “Have I just gotten soft?!”), more appreciative of peace and quiet. But it’ll always be home to me, no matter where I am in the world.
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