I heart NY

This is a rumination about wanting. Not the type of wanting where people die in the absence of the thing that they want. Things like food, or health, or fewer bombs in the street outside. My pudgy elitist existence survives independently of such matters that trouble the majority of the people in the world today. This angst dwells on a full belly.

Not also the type of wanting where people live to achieve purposes and objectives, such as the job on Wall Street, the Boston Marathon, or the attentions of the young lady in the front row of the class. A large part of my life is spent studying such wants -- they have no place in this loose-lipped reverie.

This is also not about wanting the unattainable, something a million excruciated (and excruciating) lyrics and poems have attested to. It's about wanting that which we have no control over, which might fall into our laps as destiny's rightful due, or forever elude our gainsaying grasps. Maybe the reason I'm having trouble putting it in words is because we don't really have a word for it, do we? Maybe the story is what is required.

On Friday morning I took advantage of the services of my old friends at Fung Wah to skip down to New York City. The forecast was for rain, and my plan was to skip through to Times Square and thence New Jersey, where I was bound. But like all plans, the weather too ganged agley, and the driver didn't stop for a break, and I was in the city in bright sunshine an hour before schedule. Driving in past New Rochelle I was surprised to feel a thrill down my spine when I saw in traffic a representative of the limo service I'd used a million times before. Going over the GWB, I decided the day was too good to waste. I dialed a friend's number.

When the bus stopped in Chinatown, I said hello to the bridge and hopped into a yellow cab for Washington Square. While I waited for my friend, I wandered round the square, breathing it all in again. No one approached me selling nefarious substances (how come?) and hotdogs had gone up to two bucks each (crazy). I took a few photos, clandestine and otherwise. It was a beautiful day.


My friend soon came skipping out to the park, bedecked in blue. We retired to a coffeehouse in the West Village and waggled jaws over coffee and biscotti and the latest rumors. As we talked, I felt this urge to go uptown, instead of the quick exit via 42nd. She urged. I went. The subway lines were just the same; I changed at 59th Street, feeling groovy. It was fun to get into the car that would stop exactly next to the stairs, just like old times. Uptown, I surprised the folks who had been my close friends and associates for so long. I even caught the old old secretary on her way out outside the office (she arrives and leaves early). She hugged me, like always, and cried as she walked off. Upstairs I jumped the gang, and we then sat out in the sun, just like old times, until the call from my sister-in-law in Jersey. I left around 6.

I spent Saturday and Sunday nights in Jersey. (We watched four World Cup games, two French Open finals, and three movies -- that makes nine cheers for suburbia.) Sunday after lunch I caught the train back to Boston from Newark. As we pulled into NY Penn Station, the thought struck me -- this is the first time in so many years that I'm actually taking this train through NYC -- ordinarily I'd take it either going to / from Boston or DC. For those who haven't taken this train, it goes underground as it approaches Manhattan from the south, and crosses the island going roughly west to east, emerging in Queens where it turns northwards. As we came over ground, the first sight I saw was the number 7 train, that runs from 42nd Street in Manhattan to the desi ghetto Jackson Heights in Queens. I remembered the time as an international students' peer advisor I'd mentioned this train and its cosmopolitan nature during my welcome speech to an utterly mystified incoming batch. (That was also the year I'd got to shepherd these kids to the US Open being played right... there.) My train curved left, to the north, and the east coast of Manhattan came into sight. Between the UN building and the Triboro bridge, I thought I saw the Dakotas. In my iPod, John Lennon sang, "I didn't mean / to hurrrrrrrt you." That was when it struck me. I was nostalgic, all weekend I had been nostalgic, but it was for something I had floated away from without ever having any knowledge of the nature of the float.

I'd lived in NYC for the better part of six years. I loved the place. Evidently, I still do. But I had made a decision to move on, and my life was now elsewhere. Even today, as I struggle with the decision to move back to America, I know that it is not to New York that I must go, for it is not New York that beckons. Yet there is something about the place that called out to me with such purpose that every extra minute spent there, even though it may have been against my original intentions, even if it were in the stupid delayed NJ Transit bus queue, was worth its weight in worthwhileness.

I wonder why.

And this brings me back to where I started. I know, and the choices I have made show, that I don't really want to live in this city as much as I want some of the other things I have chosen. And I like what I have chosen, and life is good. So why this non-adaptive nostalgia, for something that I myself have decided is not part of the grand plan? It's a peculiar manifestation of post-decision dissonance, isn't it, that bumps up the attractiveness of the non-chosen option in strange ways while doing nothing to affect that of what has been chosen. What is it that makes us want what we have demonstrated we don't want? Sitting in the train speeding through Connecticut, I trawled my mind for a way to describe what I was feeling, but came up blank. I know some poet somewhere must have nailed it sometime. But yesterday, me and Amtrak and Sam Adams, we couldn't work it out.