Day Trips Back to NYC

by Emily Layden

The round-trip ticket from Albany-Rensselaer to New York-Penn cost $84, which is too much for what is, essentially, a commuter rail with only marginally cleaner bathrooms and more comfortable seats. I left on a Friday after work on the 4:10 and arrived in New York around seven. At Penn Station I bought a $10 Metrocard and took the 1 train to Times Square where I transferred to the N or the Q or the R, none of which were running normally, and then walked the four or five blocks to our hotel, where my fiancé was staying on business.

I moved to New York the day after I graduated from college, and left 11 months later. In New York I lived for a while with my aunt and uncle and then for a while longer in a converted one-bedroom apartment with two roommates. I worked at a magazine and called in credits and wrote copy about lamé and raffia and lucite. I liked the people I worked with and for, liked the rhythm of the average day but particularly morning runs in Central Park, liked going to fashion shows and store openings. I left New York without any sense of occasion, simply because there was an offer for a job somewhere else that would not require me to sit at a desk in a cubicle for eight hours a day, and simply because I was not particularly happy, and thought I might be happier somewhere else.

It was after eight by the time I got to our hotel. I ordered takeout, but decided I wanted to walk to pick it up and so I walked from our hotel on 57th to Candle Café on 75th Street. It was quiet in the way the Upper East Side is always quiet, and I passed Juice Press and Kusmi Tea and Scoop and on the way back to my hotel I played the game I always used to play: I like to see if my pace and the changing of the lights will match up in exactly the same way, so I end up taking the same pattern across the grid in both directions — over and up, down and over, et cetera. My seitan burger ($23.78) was cold and the tapioca cheese was like plastic; I ate it methodically while watching Rachel Maddow, like any number of nights in 2012.

A month after I left New York I met and fell in love with the man who is now my fiancé (a word I hate, but what else am I supposed to say?). Priorities shifted. Together we have lived in three different apartments and raised a dog and opened a joint savings account (we are still not exactly sure what we’re saving for, but I guess we will figure that out as we go along); all I mean is that our lives have a different rhythm.

My fiancé had to work on Saturday and I had plans to meet up with a friend (the same friend I used to go running with in Central Park in the mornings) for a late brunch. I got coffee ($2.45) and an $11 juice from Juice Press (because, when in Rome) and walked from 63rd and Third down to SoHo via Fifth, past the Park and the Plaza and St. Peter’s, which no longer has scaffolding over the front, and the library, past the still-quiet storefronts on lower Fifth, down through Union Square. I always liked lower Fifth Avenue in the mornings. When I got to SoHo I stopped in Anthropologie and spent 45 minutes picking out overpriced candles and votive holders and brightly-colored dish towels ($91.47) and then wandered in and out of the places I used to go — Zara and Intermix and Kirna Zabete — before getting on the F train at Broadway-Lafayette and heading over to Brooklyn.

Early in our relationship we took a day trip to New York City. We went to the Met because he loves art and history and then ate dinner at Gigino’s (the new one, on the waterfront in Battery Park). I tried to show him all the things I say I miss about New York: the Park, Jules Bastien-Lepage’s portrait of Joan of Arc at the Met, rosewater macarons from Ladurée. It occurs to me now that when I say I miss New York those things are not really what I mean.

I met my friend at her new apartment in Boerum Hill and together we walked to brunch (she paid; $33) at a restaurant decorated with tabouret chairs and Edison bulbs. Afterwards we walked through Brooklyn Heights over to the water and then back. This friend kept asking me where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do as if she couldn’t believe I only wanted to walk with her. I always only want to walk. We said goodbye on a subway platform and I got off a stop early so I could pass by a Duane Reade and buy a few waters ($6.23).

Every few months I complain that I miss New York and so we go for a day, or a weekend, and go for runs along the Hudson River and down around the tip of the island and eat dinner somewhere I used to go — Candle 79 or Il Mattone or Pastis. Inevitably on the way home when I am tired and my feet hurt and I have spent too much money — money I really meant to spend on furniture that is not from Ikea or sheets that are not made of jersey — I tell him I do not miss New York, not at all. What I mean is that I do not know how to be in New York and be the person I am today.

Saturday night we went to dinner at a restaurant I used to go to, the same restaurant I went to with my grandmother and mother and best friend the day we picked up my wedding dress. We ate artichokes and gnocchi and drank red wine and shared crème brulée ($150), and it was one of those nights where you remember entirely how completely in love you are with a person. On the way home we cut across 53rd (or 54th) and I had the sudden feeling that maybe I had never walked down this exact block before. It does not get old.

The truth is not so much that I miss New York but also, perhaps, that I miss the part of me that went into loving it, have some kind of guilt for not seeing the thing through. I grew up upstate — not far from where we live now — and day trips to New York City were commonplace adventures. The winter I turned 20 I interned at a magazine, and the following summer at a design house, and somewhere along the way I committed myself to the place. I did not keep my promise. Perhaps it did not keep its promise either, but more likely I did not understand the promise I was making. The future I am committed to no longer involves a place but a person, and I would not trade it for the world.

On Sunday we got coffee at Starbucks ($5) and smoothies at Juice Press ($22) (because he had never been) and went for a walk in the Park. It was cold. He had more work to do and I had to get back home, so I took the N or the Q or the R (still not running normally; $2.50) and then the 1 to Penn Station. I was tired and my feet hurt. As I was getting on the train I forgot, for the first time in years, to take a seat on the side that overlooks the river. I looked out at Harlem and then Yonkers and then Poughkeepsie and watched the landscape flatten.

Emily Layden is a freelance writer — among other things — whose work has appeared at or in The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, Runner’s World, and elsewhere. You can follow her various pursuits on Twitter.

Photo: Rik-shaw

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