I’ll come right and say it. New York City has been one of the great loves of my life. I’ve lived here longer than any other place in my life. I came here following my dreams, and over time things shifted, apartments shifted, priorities shifted, life shifted. New York was constant. In the beginning, living the gig life, I lived in NY to leave it. When life settled down, I put roots down. Where I had grown up was just that. New York was home.
When things got serious with my then girlfriend and I and we started looking toward the future we’d say stuff like: “Well we’ll get married, and then probably leave New York.” We got married. Then it was, “Well, we’ll have a kid and leave New York.” We had our daughter. “Well, when she starts school, we leave New York.” Pre-school, came and went, and we got her into a really great public school in our area of town, and elementary school began in earnest.
We stopped saying “Well.” When I first moved in with my now wife, there was an elderly German man who lived immediately next door. Kept mostly to himself, we’d go stretches of time without physically seeing him. One day younger guy came out of the place, and we inquired if he was new to the building. No, he was the son, his father had been moved into a retirement home, need of further assistance. After that my wife and I joked that someday that would be our child, helping to clean out the apartment after we were off to the old folks home. And after we stopped saying, “Well” - it looked like that path lay ahead of us.
Then 2020 happened. After surviving the spring in lockdown- the idea of being quarantined in the city for the summer time led us to think about finding someplace else to go for the summer. Sublet our place, and escape for a bit. But who’d want to sublet our NYC apartment in the height of a pandemic, especially when we were ground zero. So we started exploring the possibility of a more permanent move. My wife started googling places. My sister passed her real estate agent in NJ that they had used… and after crunching some number, we found ourselves house hunting in Jersey, near my sis and my mother.
And two months later we are less than a week from actually leaving New York. It turns out that in the middle of a pandemic was a good time for us to make this transition. Although we both have jobs in the city, neither me nor my wife will be working physically in our offices anytime soon, so we’ll have a chance to settle in to our new digs without throwing a commute on top of everything else.
But saying goodbye is hard. And while we’ll soon have modem conveniences that many people outside of NYC take for granted, and that we have longed for- central a/c, our own washer and dryer, a garage- getting those means tearing out roots. Breaking apart from dreams and memories and starting anew. There’s so much good that we’re excited about with this move, and let’s face it- a lot of shit we’ll be leaving behind. I plan to explore some of these emotions and trepidations over the next week here, and invite all of you to join me. Next up: The Guilt.