With this long New York winter, I’ve flirted with thoughts of other cities. But in my heart I know I’m not going anywhere.
Unlike many of the people my age who have recently moved to Brooklyn, I was born here before I moved back. My mother had me and my brother in a Park Slope midwifery and we lived in Bay Ridge for seven years when I was a child. I remember driving to Westchester in our car behind the moving van and looking out at the East River and the Statue of Liberty we could so easily see on a clear day in our neighborhood. I fought the urge to cry.
My senior year of college at NYU I decided to move back to Brooklyn. I told my friends that I wanted to move to East Williamsburg. They laughed at me, since only recently had Williamsburg proper become cool. My invocation of this seemingly invented neighborhood was my way of telling them that I was leaving them behind for the fringe. It was in line with my desire to get a bartending gig and learn how to write. I didn’t care about internships or graduate school—I wanted to seek out what I had heard was the vanguard of a new bohemia.
I combed Craigslist for the perfect furnished apartment and found it almost immediately. That weekend I took the L train to the Montrose stop to see what might be my new home. Upon exiting the station, I felt like I was in a different city, in a different world from the one I had left behind in the East Village. Hardly any people walked the streets. It was a barren, not altogether hostile world, with the odd skinny-jeans wearing hipster here and there. I loved it.
The exposed cabinets and Ikea furniture in my new apartment represented everything I wanted from my post-collegiate life—Brooklyn was cool, barren, and unique. Being back, albeit at the opposite end of the borough I had grown up in, made me feel at home.
Over the nine months I lived on Boerum Street, I learned a lot about the neighborhood. I developed special preferences: organic food, craft beer, and the typical snobbery and pride in a quieter, slower pace of life that many Brooklynites hold toward “The City.” When I got a job writing blogs in Midwood I had no occasion to visit Manhattan at all. I reveled in the borough of my birth.
One night I was with a local violinist and her friend, a bass player who used to photograph wolves in Canada for National Geographic. He told me that before the English and the Dutch arrived, the Algonquin nation used to convene on Manhattan for the summer solstice; they forbid habitation on the sacred isle—they believed that the energy was too strong for anyone to live there, and if they did lunacy would result. We joked that they were right.
Since then, the three years I’ve spent in Brooklyn have been some of my favorites. Of course, I have been unfaithful at times to Brooklyn since my return. There have been late nights in the East Village at Yaffa Cafe or in the L.E.S. at Max Fish, at art galleries in Chelsea and Rudy’s in Hell’s Kitchen. And before my girlfriend and I moved in together in September, we considered making a bid on the Upper East Side. But in the end, Brooklyn won out. After all, we decided, it’s where where we first met.
In the end I will always come back to Brooklyn. There are times when I want to move away, to Italy or Oregon, but I know that even if I do leave, it won’t be permanent. Brooklyn is my first, maybe my best love. Just don’t tell my girlfriend.
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