(Whenever you read this diary again, I want you to know that I was crying happy tears as I wrote this. May 30, 2022.)
The first time I came to New York was Christmas of 2017. It was also my first time in America. UConn hadn’t started yet, so instead of going straight to Connecticut, I stayed in New York by myself. I spent Christmas there, and then New Year’s.
I remember the first time I went to Central Park. It was brutally cold. The air hurt my nose and my lungs when I breathed it in. I’ve forgotten which entrance I took and which paths I walked. I only remember that all the trees were bare, with hardly any dirty snow on the ground. I walked through the park alone, thinking how wonderful life was.
Then I went to UConn. I did not like UConn at all. I still have to emphasize this, because it matters to me. I’ve always regretted turning down NYU to go to UConn. I’m not even a particularly status-conscious person, but every time some idiot from NYU tried to act superior because of where they went to school, I would get absolutely furious.
During those years, I spent almost every weekend correcting my mistake in an extremely inefficient way. Around eight on Saturday morning, I would leave downtown Hartford and take the train, Greyhound, or Peter Pan into the city. The bus would dump me at Port Authority. Then I would start walking and find some random deli to get something to eat.
I didn’t really buy luxury things, and there wasn’t much I particularly wanted to own, so I could recklessly spend most of my living expenses on New York instead. Almost every week, I stayed one night in the city, usually for around three hundred dollars. That came to about fifteen hundred a month just for hotels. Two months of that could have bought me a Chanel bag.
I went to plenty of places that New Yorkers would later make fun of me for liking. I have never cared much about that kind of thing. I had wanted to live in New York since middle school and high school. Blame all those writers for making it sound so beautiful. But I can confidently say that New York did not disappoint me at all. It was exactly as I had imagined it.
I loved Central Park the first time I came, and I kept loving it. I liked the tacky Christmas decorations. I liked the horse-drawn carriages carrying tourists around. I even liked the places completely overrun by tourists. The New York I had imagined was supposed to be loud, crowded, expensive, full of every kind of person, with everything happening at once. So when I finally lived there and discovered that it really was like that, I was extremely pleased.
At night I would usually call up friends who lived in the city and get dinner with them. Sometimes we went to Jongro for Korean barbecue and then kept drinking our way down 32nd Street. Pocha 32 was upstairs, with fishing nets and soju caps hanging chaotically from the ceiling. We liked ordering the soju that came in a hollowed-out watermelon. On weekends we often had to wait downstairs forever. After that we would go to Bangia. Bangia was underground and had no windows, so once you went in, you stopped knowing what time it was outside. We would order more soju and a bunch of food we were already too full to eat, and our voices would get louder and louder. When we finally came back up, 32nd Street would still be bright.
I loved K-town. I knew quite a few Korean guys back then. Most of them were fuckboys, but they were genuinely so much fun. Sometimes I would flirt with a waiter for ages, and he would keep pouring me free drinks. Looking back, that whole culture was pretty gross, but at the time I didn’t mind it.
There were a lot of things I didn’t mind in New York. I also went to plenty of art and photography exhibitions in my attempts to be cultured. My more sophisticated friends would stand around seriously discussing the work, and some of them would spend a lot of money buying paintings or photographs. Honestly, I’ve never been that interested in painting. I usually stood there looking completely lost, with nothing to say.
On Sunday night, I would take the bus back to Hartford.
Next week, I’d come back.
In 2019, when I was twenty-five, I found a job in New York. It paid eighty thousand dollars a year.
For a while, I stayed with my best friend in the East Village. Somehow I have completely forgotten exactly where she lived, but I still remember the extremely difficult old lady next door. If we made even a little noise, she would come knocking to complain. Somehow, in the end, the old lady and I became friends. She even told me that when she died, she was going to leave me all her jewelry. I had completely forgotten about this until I started writing it down just now. I should go see her next time I’m in the East Village. Maybe I’ll inherit some jewelry.
I worked on the 32nd floor of WFC. At lunch, I would just buy something from one of the food carts downstairs, watch all the serious finance people around me, and then go back to work. The company was full of mean white men and women, and I didn’t make a single friend there. They were always going to happy hour in the afternoon. I knew there was a bar nearby where oysters were ten dollars a dozen. By the time I left, I still had no idea where it was.
Later still, I moved across the river. From my apartment, I could see the Hudson and the Statue of Liberty every day. When I first moved in, I used to look at them. Eventually, I stopped. When friends came over for the first time, they would stand by the window and say, “Oh my God, you get to see the Statue of Liberty every day.” I would walk over and look at it again with them.
God, I really wanted to fall in love in New York, but the men in New York often annoyed me, especially the finance guys. They spent all day calculating things and rushing around, always so busy, and sometimes I would look at them and find the whole thing very funny. They weren’t the kind of boy I had imagined. The boy I imagined was quiet, but passionate? Ideally, he would have monolids and full lips, and be tall and broad. He had to be good at sex, or at least really like sex.
In winter, we would walk through the snow together. I would put his cold hand on my breast to warm it. I would be very tender with him, and let him be tender with me. That boy never appeared in New York.
I decided to leave New York when I was twenty-eight. I felt that I had gotten too old for New York. I was going to move to California. Everyone said the weather was nice there, you could drive everywhere, and everyone wore yoga pants and had brightly colored hair.
Not long before I left, I went to Central Park again. This time, it was for Gleen’s wedding. Gleen had been my rental broker, and later I became very good friends with his wife, Liu. Liu really liked me. She invited me over for dinner every week, and after we ate I would lie on her couch and make her give me a massage. She had really strong hands. She would massage Gleen first, then wait until she didn’t have much strength left before doing me. I really have no shame.
They didn’t have a big wedding. They just found a spot in Central Park and invited a few people they were close to. The weather was beautiful that day. The trees and the grass were green, and we had been told to wear champagne-colored dresses. They stood there and got married while people kept jogging past, walking their dogs, pushing strollers.
After the wedding, Liu hugged me and told me she hoped I would be happy. I touched her wedding dress. It felt a little scratchy.
A few days later, I went to Central Park again by myself. I don’t remember which entrance I used that day either. People were jogging. People were walking their dogs. People were asleep on the grass. I walked to the bridge I had always liked and sat there for a while.
The first time I came, in 2017, all the trees were bare. Now all the trees are green.