Leaving New York (#3)

Why I left the city

The other day I received a hand-written letter, which began:

Dear [REDACTED],

Why did you drop off the face of the earth? And why did you insist that I write to you by letter? What’s wrong with using email or, god forbid, WhatsApp¹? I don’t even know if you’ll end up receiving this. But, if you do, I expect the response you promised because…

Throughout the rest of the letter Deepak returns to my “eccentricities”—he, like everyone else, doesn’t care much for them—and, more interestingly, proffers many updates from his life. Naturally, I don’t feel it appropriate to disclose the entire letter here.

That said, since many others have asked me similar questions as those transcribed above, I figured I’d publish the relevant parts of my response so that, if someone else is inclined to write me, we don’t need to rehash the same story.

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Back in April of last year (2024, that is), I was struggling to sleep in spite of the pleasant chilliness and soporific city sounds that were coming through the open window next to my bed. I was thinking about my performance review, set for ten a.m. the following morning. I had been through a succession of tech jobs from twenty-two to twenty-eight and had never cared much about any of them. But for this one I had made such an effort—moving cities, working ten-hour days, spending Friday nights in the office—that I was praying with all my might for a promotion. When compared with the peers of my graduating class, I was at least three years behind the most remedial.

Never being that good at what you do for eight hours a day, every day, grinds at you. It’s hard to compartmentalize and seeps into how you see yourself generally. For an hour or two every week, I’d see myself as an idiot. But the more long-lasting change was that I was starting to see myself as someone who did not—who could not—do anything that well.

The money would be nice, too. Even though I was earning in the mid six figures I was burning it at the same rate. $3500 per month for the Upper West Side studio, $500 a weekend if I stepped outside my apartment. Like nothing I was piling up bills for $8,000, didn’t have an infinite pool nor a harem of Turkish super models to show for it. I didn’t really have anything to show for it, come to think of it.

I lay in bed turning over, thinking of nothing useful, not a yawn in the room or even in the city for me to try to catch onto. Around midnight I gave up and turned on my bedside lamp. I picked up my copy of King Lear, which I’d read for thirty minutes before turning the light off, as I was in the habit of doing. After fifteen minutes, no less awake than before, I turned on Sky Bri. For two years I’d been obsessed with her. Autumn Falls, too. I hardly needed anyone else online.

After I finished I returned to Shakespeare’s poetry. With the laptop buried in blue blankets on the couch, where it could not get to me again, I read for another fifteen minutes. But there was a subtle guilt assailing me throughout that made the music of his words and the vividness of the scenes inaccessible to me. I turned off the light and at some point, finally, I feel asleep.

When I stepped outside the next morning I knew, immediately, that it was the first real day of Spring. There had been a few cracks in the Winter, but this was the first day of the season that would bring everyone out. The cool air electrified my skin, brought my entire being into an exhilarating alertness, an exalted exultation, and in spite of my sleeplessness and my worries, which were really my hopes, I felt for a few moments, as I went wildly sniffing the brownstones’ yellow, blue, and purple flowers, fresh and just coming into bloom, the potency of the ecstasy Life can somehow deliver. I started striding at fifteen miles per hour, like a man discovering the Bolivian cocoa leaf one hour into the bracing, rarefied air of a great climb. By the 72nd St. subway I stood with men and women eddying around me as I took a final great inhale of the flowers and the trees that ran along the edge of Central Park. Then I descended down the stairs into the rattling train that spit me out on 14th Street.