Give Me Some Bright Lights

It's a funny thing, being a New Yorker outside of New York. You never really stop being a New Yorker; you've just become a relocater. An expat. Someone who still answers "where are you from?" with "New York" long after they've lost their (212) or (646). Of course, I honestly answer "Philadelphia" to "where do you live?", but unless you've asked your question with that sort of precision, expect "New York" to appear somewhere in my answer.

And it works both ways--once you've lived in New York for a certain amount of time, adapted to the lifestyle of grocery shopping taking place on a need-to-live basis via corner bodegas and expecting everything from pharmacies to gift shops to be open to twenty-four hours, and adopted the official "Manhattan pace" of walking which gives you absolutely not patience for anyone who isn't practically running right in front of you, you refer to yourself as a New Yorker as if you've been born and bred.

Take Sex and the City for example, which is, in its own way, the most authentic New York show of our generation, taking into account the existence of studio apartments, buildings going go-op, and psychotic street noise in a way that Friends never quite got down. Of the four fabulous friends, not one of them actually hailed from New York, but who among us could dare refer to designer-loving, meat-packing-district-dwelling, new-club-hopping foursome as anything but the genuine article? After all, did Charlotte not epitomize the Upper East Side? Did Miranda not wholeheartedly embody the bitchy, cynical, professional but kind of pathetic women who swarm midtown? And of course, Carrie Bradshaw captured it all in one tiny exchange in the series finale: Frenchman: "American?"/Carrie: "New Yorker."

Exactly.

So it should come as no surprise that I still view myself exactly as such; a New Yorker trapped in the much better and cheaper apartment of a Philadelphian. Only now that I'm no longer living in the city, I surprise myself by what I remember most fondly, where I'd most like to go upon returning, and which spots seem like beacons calling me home. (Hint for the last one: Yoni now wakes me up in the car as soon as the Empire State Building comes into view. Naturally, like any real New Yorker, I've never been inside even though I've walked past a thousand times, but now, it's a newfound love.) I find that it's not the Upper West Side, which I called home for the last year (2 if you count my having taken up regular residence at 4Q) that I miss at all; in fact, I don't even care to go back. And I'm not judging--I know that when I lived there, I never wanted to leave either--but now that I'm removed from New York, I recognize that I'm tired of running into people I know every half a block and tired of squishing into the same bars over and over again, and that is when I so desperately miss the village.

I know I loved living there in NYU and still I find I undervalued it. Sure, I always knew I loved BBar, but after a year of Parlour and Brother Jimmy's and The Dead Poet and Parlour and The Gin Mill and Parlour, I realize what a great thing we had going once upon a time. Cedar. Slainte. Rico. How did we, I, not take more advantage? I spent a year living across the street from Crime Scene thinking "I wonder what it's like inside," and to this day still have not been. I walked along the Hudson, sat on the grassy piers overlooking the water, and thought "I'll be back here when it gets warm out again." I wasn't. I sat in the little nook of street where Commerce Street curves into Barrow and thought "I MUST go to the bar here," all the while staring at the sign for the Cherry Lane Theater, and never once did it occur to me to go there instead. Of course, I never ended up going to the bar either. Sometimes I think that if it weren't for my journalism major, I never would've left my dorm room at all.

I sure as hell wouldn't have gone to see those gates.