From the Beginning

In the beginning, dating you was difficult.  Grocery shopping was difficult.  Getting to class on time was difficult.  Not crying on the subway was difficult.  In grocery stores, I had to remember that I didn’t have a stove or even any dishes in my new home so I had better stick to buying things that I could eat right out of the package – or, better yet, I should leave the grocery store and go to Starbucks and just stick to coffee.  And my classes were in the West Village. (Or was it the East Village? I still can’t figure that out.)  And every time I got off the subway I always managed to walk in a new wrong direction and get very lost – though it would take me a while to realize that I was lost because nothing was familiar so wrong turns looked right to me.  This would happen to me whenever you asked me to meet you somewhere for a date.  It was always somewhere I had never been and I always walked all the wrong ways so I was always late and overwhelmed and almost crying. 

In the beginning, you were dating me and I was a tourist with a very enamored guide.  The first time I went to Central Park was with you, on our second date.  Within my first month in New York and our first month together, you took me to The Met, The Highline, The Cloisters, the Lower East Side, The Museum of the City of New York, Brooklyn and Queens.  And you would drive me places in your car.  That’s how I learned the names of the rivers and the FDR and some of the bridges. 

In the beginning, I missed everything.  I missed everywhere I have ever lived or been before moving to New York.  I missed my friends, my brothers, and the idea I used to have of the person I would be.  And I cried almost every night.  But you didn’t know that, then.  That’s what went wrong, in the very beginning.  I was so lost inside the thick fog of loneliness, that sometimes I could barely see you.

After the beginning, I got worse.  You started taking me to your friends’ parties and I would find myself feeling like a tourist of their lives – their inside jokes and college memories, everything that they still had and that I had left behind before moving to New York.  I felt like an uninvited guest at the proverbial party, a resident outsider.  And I would end up alone, maybe in a corner, probably drinking too much.

In the end, I gave up grocery shopping, I learned my way around the city, and I stopped crying --for the most part.  I began to find a life for myself in New York, but I couldn’t find an invitation into the life that you already had before you met me.  In the end, you called me a contrarian.  You said you couldn’t be with me because I liked being different and I didn’t mind being alone.  But I minded.  That was the problem from the very beginning.