One of the things I love most about New York is that people don’t automatically ask, “What do you do?” or “Where are you from?” when meeting new people. The first question that I have encountered most frequently in New York is more endearing, more engaged, more revelatory: “What’s your story?”
My story isn’t easy to summarize in an elevator pitch (though whose is?). An Airbus 3332 dropped me off in Newark last spring, and with croissants lining my pockets, no job offers on the table, and a two-month sublet at 2nd and 77th, I created myself a home. In those first few weeks, all I had were three suitcases, two purses, and none of my beloved 5€ Gamay, simply because I physically couldn’t have carried anything else with me. And in those first moments, my story shifted from Paris to New York.
I spent my first summer in the city on long walks through Central Park with Nora Ephron in my ear, searching for the city’s best pierogies, dumplings, and chocolate chip cookies. I reveled in the copious availability of iced coffee and the freedom to walk outside with wet hair should I feel like it, though I often didn’t (some French habits can’t be changed). That summer, as the smells of garbage seeped into East 77th Street every Tuesday on my late night walks home, when, presumably, a flour delivery at Pick-a-Bagel would cause a powdery cloud nearby, I began to feel butterflies for New York the same way I had felt for Paris.
I only bring this up to introduce the role New York will play in this new story, as a setting both inspiring and frustrating, breathtaking and soul-sucking, that is just as ready to lift you up as it is to smack you back down again. But at least the cookies make up for it.