sacramental spots
benches and apartments
There’s an impenetrable barrier between people who live in New York City and people who don’t. You feel it most keenly when visiting the city from out of town. Even if you’ve previously lived on the fair archipelago of New York, you very concretely Do Not Belong, unless you have an address you can call yours.
Perhaps because of this, places you’ve lived in New York take up a magical, mystical quality. Your life is so inscribed in the concrete of the sidewalks, in the shops that have remained, the ones that have changed. The memory of what it feels like to bike down your street in the spring night, with budding trees outlined darkly against the blue, how it feels to round the corner of the avenue when coming home after a long night, what it feels like to unlock the front door, to step off the front stoop, to trudge five flights of stairs, to stare at the fish and chips shop on the corner longingly. All of these feelings are so baked into the routines of your day in your own particular corner of New York. Once you change postal codes, you can never get them back. They will always belong to that moment in time when you lived in that apartment. And they will become woven into the many such feelings and moments and spaces that the billions of other people who have once walked those paths and seen those sights have felt.
Walking to an old apartment—showing a new love an old address—is an intimate act in New York City. Who were you when you lived in the apartment above the sushi restaurant on the avenue? Who were you when you lived in the brownstone by the Metro North train tracks? You can never really show them this past self, but when you walk with them, across the crosswalk you remember so well, the hill you avoided climbing up as much as possible, smelling the trees and hearing the clatter of trains passing, you bring them with you into this journey of your past you. You can stop into the same bar or beer hall, and feel, in some ways, that old neighborhood feeling seep into your bones. In some way, it’s the closest they can ever be to the you that is no longer is. They can walk — literally — in your footsteps.
I continually maintain it is terrible to be a tourist in New York. And I know as soon as I become a visitor to this city, I will miss living here. Because it is living here that is so magical: layering your story on the many other pilgrim stories here. New York, for all its transitory nature and capitalist glamour, most sweetly rewards those who live here deeply, who put down roots and try to grow, like all those trees poking through Manhattan concrete.
One of my most beloved places in all of New York is the set of benches in front of the duck pond in Central Park that has been the place I begin each morning for the past two years. In March 2020, for the first few days of shutdown, I found the walls closed in fairly quickly unless I spent time outside each day. So I began each morning with my french press, taking a cup of coffee the five yards across the street to the park. I brought with me my breviary and began to pray on the benches just inside the entrance to the park each morning, something I had tried to do unsuccessfully on a bench in Riverside Park uptown. Walking down five flights of stairs and over several blocks to a small bench separated from the river by a highway didn’t have the same zen.
After sitting next to a girl on the phone with her therapist for several Wednesdays in a row, I decided to abandon the benches by the entrance and go further into the park, away from the street, down the hill to the ring of benches in front of the duck pond.
And there I sat, for hours, some days in May and June of 2020, praying, reading Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Tolstoy, Ann Patchett, Rilke, Frost, novels for book club, and poetry collections I’d been gifted long ago but never had time to read.
Reading sessions turned into long phone calls. I decided where to go to grad school, caught up with old friends, had chats that would change the course of my life — all while sitting on that bench, and on the rocks by the pond, and walking through the woods on the other side.
I love that bench in all seasons—and I love it because I know it: in the perfect green of spring as trees blossom into flowers all around the banks and the willow branches sprout leaves. In the impossibly verdant lushness of high summer. In the sprays of yellow and red in autumn. In the iced-over pond and hushed snow of winter. I’ve lived in it and known it and loved it in all these.
Moving is a kind of death. Leaving behind the person I am in the places that hold the person — the places that shape my daily routines, that have colored my experience with their beauty—is the death of moving I get most sentimental and nostalgic about. Places call forth from us new ways of being, they connect us to the land underneath our feet, the seasons, and to the invisible community of all who have ever lived and loved in that same place.