I’ve been watching Gossip
Girl lately, which is possibly not the best thing to be doing while in my
current nostalgic funk but I’m kind of afraid to take a trip home, not only
because of the price of the plane ticket. I’m afraid to see how much has
changed.
The past twenty years of my
life have been passing through my memory: places I’ve lived and
sometimes-questionable things I’ve worn, haircuts I’ve had but this program,
with its smash cuts of Manhattan streets I walked and stores I shopped at,
delis I grabbed soup & sandwich combos from, and martinis I drank just hit
home in a new way with an episode shot outside the bar beneath my onetime home
in Brooklyn.
That apartment is now a
landmark building in an ultra-hip area. The bodega across the street where we
could only afford one sandwich for dinner to share, with the kid who used to
make our salami, cheese and pickle sandwich into a poor man’s Cuban by placing
it under the Pyrex coffee pot on the coffeemaker is gone. It’s now someone’s
fancy-schmancy apartment. The Macy’s where I bought two pair of Converse
one-stars (one pink suede and one mint green pearlized leather) for ten bucks
doesn’t exist. Instead of bodegas, there are boutiques. Instead of bodegas
there are more renovated brownstones. It’s not the same. The things I loved
about the neighborhood—the amalgam of classes, the Goodwill and the sushi
joint, the arab deli, the salvage warehouses and the housing project—have
undoubtedly been cleaned up. Gentrified. Pushed out to make way for chic shops
filled with things I once again cannot afford.
The midtown Manhattan where
I worked has been Disney-fied and green-ified—the falafel cart in front of my
office building shooed away in favor of green bike lanes, the Thanksgiving
parade route altered. I’ve even heard you can get cell service in that
once-upon-a-time place where no one could reach me—the subway.
The restaurant from which I
got the best burger in Larchmont after running the NYC Marathon has closed, my
friend from the burrito joint has moved to Belgium, one of my best friends is
painting her house to ready it for sale. If I go back, she might not be there.
Things change.
Living in this place where
some things haven’t changed in thousands of years, it often feels like I could
wind my watch back three years and be right back where I was. But I can’t. I
made choices. I’ve changed. My apartment is filled with someone else’s furniture.
My job no longer exists. I won’t fit there anymore.
