All That was New York

artwork by Mild Pichitpongchai

By Amy Dai

Time has been working against me, and in a way I’d always feared. The day before my best friend had to move into college, we were sitting on the curb outside of her house. My eyes were fixed on the bits of gravel that I was beginning to crush underneath my flip flops. I shifted my feet back and forth before kicking at the road, sending a puff of gray dust out into the open. It was late August, and the air began to contain the slightest chill once the sun set. I held a long breath. My eyes were closed when I croaked out my bye. 

At eighteen, the world seemed to work in only one way and that was against me.

New York was sterile that fall: I got by on most days without having to leave my suite. When I wasn’t working on my school work, I was either gripping onto friends from home or sitting on the other side of calls with my mom, whose wrath would be seeping through the phone. Later that day, I slumped at my wooden desk. Flipping to the next clean page in my spiral journal, I scribbled furiously inside the lined sheets, pressing down on my pen so hard that indents were left even on the paper beneath. The black ink would be smudged into the crevices on the side of my hand, and licking my right thumb, I would try to rub the traces away. Feeling a bit satisfied with myself, I closed the book and jumped back into my twin-sized bed. That was my routine for a while. 

Then I became nineteen. Goodbye to all the impressions I’d left that first year. My arm became tattooed, I left piercings on my nose and ears, and I showed up smaller than before. I had all but two friends left from home at this point. I stopped using social media altogether, convinced that it was a space for ill intentions only. The principle of all this: identify and eliminate every trigger of my shame. A glance in my direction, comments that one could believe were snarky, a point below what was expected on an assignment, the slightest display of judgment, my warped reflection cast on display against the windows along my block – these were all something. Everything was something else to me.

Soon I met a girl that had a lightness about her. Her brown curls flying at every step, she would introduce herself in my kitchen, her dark eyes glistening with stupid naivety. I’ll call her K. Our classes and roommates and mutual friends linking us inevitably together, our problem perhaps was that we spent too much time together too early on. We felt like neither friends nor family. Then, I turned to her. 

“You’re too simple, like really, have you ever struggled before?”

She sulked, and apologies were performed.

After we finished our last midterm in the fall, I sat her in my kitchen before locking myself in my bedroom, staring into the mirror as I dug the tips of my finger, smeared with concealer, into my acne scars. I then smoothed my hands down the leather jacket I changed into, giving the bottom a light tug before walking out. The wind blew through my hair on our walk to the pier, sending a scattering of orange leaves down around us. I walked straight out to the edge of the boardwalk, dangling my arms over the railing and looking out at the buildings against the darkening sky.

When I exhaled at this sight she turned her head, her stare making my face twitch. To our left a couple was dancing, arm in arm, to an old boombox that they set down on the pavement. Under the overhead light I thought their dancing looked tired. I took K’s hand and wove my fingers through hers on the walk home. Our hands swung in unison as I stared ahead with a stupid grin smeared across my face. For a moment I felt like a kid again. 

It was to my horror, though, that despite all of this, the heaviness in me seemed to grow. My pride was all I could think about that winter – even as I sobbed into the palms of my hands, my back rising up and down while leaned up against my bedroom wall, aware that her stares were burning through me. I lifted my head up. K’s eyes were saying she was searching to understand. 

About a year and a half later I found the courage to give it all up. There is no audience I’m doing all this for, I told myself in the mirror before slamming the bathroom door. Sunlight poured into my house one July afternoon, casting light shadows of the trees outside onto the golden walls of my living room. It was so very quiet. Laying on my back in bed, I strained to hear some sign of noise. A distant airplane roared above, its sound getting softer just a few seconds later. Everything then fell still again, with only the shadows returning to their dance against my walls. I understood then that I had nothing but time.

K has since moved on, and I think I have as well. It’s never a coincidence that I must leave New York the year I have loved it most. But I’m trusting, the way I said fuck it that summer to everything that once demanded all of me – my future after New York, K, my mom, the twisted pride of mine – and trusted, albeit desperately, that I wouldn’t despair once I saw this through to the end. 

“You hold your suffering too close,” she once vaguely muttered, “you want too damn much.”

The other day on a night out, I was back on my old block, skimming my fingers against the rough brick exterior of my building. Through the glazed and hazy window I saw a light in the space my room once was. The air felt thick, like it did before all this began, and using my foot, I kicked at the pile of mulch that’s fallen from the neighbor’s flower bed above. It skids into the street before dissipating into a million tiny bits. 

Amy Dai is a senior studying International Relations at CAS. In her final semester both as writer and editor of the magazine, she wants to thank Generasian for giving her a creative and connective space these past four years – thank you to everyone that has been a part of this experience.