“I like you! I like you IRL! I like you so much, and I can touch you physically and kiss you right now!” I’d scream silently from the sidelines as I grabbed at Him and tried to squeeze affection from Him. Exhausted from his dead stare into the pixelated world of his Internet empire, I’d finally give in and pick up my own phone. I’d click the little thumbs-up icon, and then he’d look up and smile at me.
How the fuck did we get here?
There were times when I was convinced that he and I were the exact same person. We loved the same things, had the same sense of humor and general understanding, and saw the world in our own special way. Then again, there were times when I believed that he must certainly be an alien from another planet. Or was it I who was the weirdo? I couldn’t ever speak to Him on the matter, so I must assume that it was me.
A few months after he and I broke up, I began therapy.
As I made my way uptown to the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, I couldn’t help but scoff at the acronym: ICP. Coincidentally (or perhaps not) it was the same as the horrifying band of nightmarish clowns known as Insane Clown Posse. You’d know them if you saw a picture of them—they’re the freak shows with the terrifying fans that dress up in spikey metal garb and paint their faces in dripping black-and-white clown makeup.
“Fantastic,” I said to myself as I ascended from the subway in Colombus Circle. “I’m an emotional Juggalo.”
I was fully prepared to do what I needed to do to begin to sort out all of the madness that had occurred as a result of losing my mind in a stupid love affair. I took full ownership of the fact that it had indeed come to the point where I could no longer go about my life without trying to crack the code as to what had brought me to this place of complete and utter despair. The proud son of a bitch that I was, I had never really thought that it would come to needing a shrink, but alas, there I was. Before I knew it, I was sitting on the couch of the good Dr. Bob. His two scraggly Jack Russell terriers ran circles around me and used me as a jungle gym, leaving their wiry white hairs all over my carefully curated all-black ensemble that seemed ever so fitting for the occasion.
Dr. Bob seemed like a nice enough guy, I figured. He had a very knowing look about himself—the cardigans he wore, the thin wire glasses, and the graying beard. He looked, in every sense, like the type of man I assumed a therapist would look like. He was kind and contemplative and utterly polite—in fact, almost too so. Part of me was waiting for Dr. Bob to get in there with the really hard-hitting questions that would strike me like a ton of bricks and force me into one of those “breakthroughs” where I would collapse into a puddle and be all like “Of course! Why didn’t I see it all along? I love me! I love me!”
Bob was great, and I saw him for a few months. Although it was like second nature for me to tell Bob all the sordid details of my relationship with Him, which was the cause of my having to seek out therapy to go on with my life, that was not the heart of the matter that Bob was trying to crack open. Dr. Bob wanted to know about my childhood and my family and what it was like for me running away from home as a teenager to make it in the big city.
I wracked by brain trying to answer the doctor truthfully. For whatever reason, I had a hard time remembering the details of how exactly I had come to be in the place I currently resided in. Truthfully, I couldn’t remember the how or the why that had set me up to be the catatonic mess that sat before him decked out in full mourning attire for the death of my wayward heart.
So much drama.
Dr. Bob wanted to know everything about my family life and what it was like growing up in Southern California. Moreover, he wanted to know why I had come to New York City in the first place. As far as I could remember, the answer was simple: I came to New York City to be in love.
It was the truth, as corny as it sounded. Near the end of high school, I began dating a very severe boy, a few years older than I, who made me want to do crazy things. I was not yet eighteen years old, and as my family was still learning how to deal with the whole “gay thing,” most of our relationship was kept shrouded in secrecy. I snuck out of the house in the night to drive around with him and kiss in his car, and I wrote him long letters that described in gory detail the darkest of my teenage carnal longing for him. We slept together at friends’ places who would have us—the whole thing was very Capulet and Montague. All the while, I yearned for an independence that would allow me to live out (what felt like it at the time) that burning teenage romance.
He was a tall and angular boy, dark and shadowed in mystery and sharp edges. He read and lived his life by the words of a man called Oscar Wilde, and I was enamored with the unconventional philosophies he rattled off. His wild heart and his thin and scruffy face and the long cigarettes he smoked enraptured me in a way little old me had never known before. I wasn’t sure if he was my first love or perhaps my first obsession or something that I had not yet developed language to describe. Regardless, all I knew was that I would follow him wherever he went—for I knew that wherever he was would be a place where I could be free from the conventional shackles of my sheltered life at home.
It seemed so casual at the time.
He said, “We should move to New York.”
I said, “Sure.”
The next thing I knew I was sleeping on a couch in a tiny little living room with him wrapped in my arms, and the brilliant and foreign light of Brooklyn was shining down upon us. The apartment belonged to some friends of his—an exotic poet girl who had ferocious opinions and feelings that scared the shit out of me and enthralled me at the same time, and her boyfriend who was in the musical “Stomp!” over on St. Mark’s Place. I envied them both. They drank a lot and seemed to really love each other, and even when they fought (which they did fairly often) I felt like they were the most adult and responsible peers I had ever come across. Crashing on their couch, I felt like I, too, was finally a real-life adult.
It was no more than a month before I broke up with the man I traveled across the country with. He had a hard time finding work in the city and an equally hard time finding himself. Perhaps the reality of the situation became too much for him—but I had gone into full-blown survival mode. I was desperate to not give up or give in. With the dregs of money we had left, we bought pasta at the grocery store to live off of. I walked slowly behind him and stole packets of dehydrated sauce that required only water to make. Although looking back it seemed like a desperate time, I knew it was just me doing what I had to do to build my foundation.
Shortly after my boyfriend left, the Twin Towers fell. He was back in California, and I hunkered down and refused to let the world get to me. Alone and confused in Manhattan, I climbed to the roof of our shitty little sublet in Washington Heights and watched as the world changed forever. The reasonable thing to do would have been to pack what few belongings I had and crawl back West. It was what everyone had expected, in fact.
Instead, I stayed. Determined to carve out a new life for myself, I toiled my way through a series of odd jobs to get by. I made coffee, I waited tables, I bartended, and I had a weird, brief foray into the world of go-go dancing and DJing. The tales of that period in my life were enough material to pique Dr. Bob’s curiosity as to what had set me so strangely in my way, but that wasn’t the heart of the matter that had turned me into the man I had become. Bob was very inquisitive as to my early life before New York that built me into the creature I was. He wanted to know about my family and my early hopes and dreams and why it was that I felt the need to find a man to complete what I had considered a life half-full.
When I shaved my hair into a gigantic blond mohawk and hauled my skinny ass up to the tops of bars and dancing platforms, I was blatantly rebelling against the world I had come from. In my young mind, I sought to curate a life that was seemingly rejected by the wholesome life I had left in California. My parents were one of the few couples I had ever known that were not torn asunder by the ravages of divorce, and I thought about this a lot. They were (and had
always been) truly and madly in love. Dad would look at my mom with stars in his eyes and felt no hesitation to share with my younger brother and me how deeply in love he was with her. It was like they were two separate parts of a great big whole that didn’t make sense when apart. They completed each other, and raised a beautiful—albeit modest—home rich with love and value.
It was not shocking to find that I desperately craved that kind of companionship. I wanted, with all of my heart, to build a home and a family the way that my parents had. I believed in true love and soulmates because it was the only kind of family I had ever known. The stakes in our respectable causes, however, were blatantly varied to a staggering extreme. I vied for the capability to emulate that beautiful portrait of family but in my own way and on my own terms.
It wasn’t rocket science. None of it was. I began to wonder what the hell I was doing every week as I made my way uptown to see Dr. Bob. I knew why I was the way I was, and I knew exactly where I was coming from. The only thing I didn’t understand was why I felt so broken and depressed in the wake of Him leaving me. I’d not wanted the doctor’s advice as to how to rebuild myself—I wanted a fix. I wanted to hear from Bob that it was a sick and cruel hand of outside force that had wrecked me. I wanted confirmation that I’d not been a fool for giving away my heart, but rather a fool for giving it to the wrong person.
Basically, I wanted Dr. Bob to grab me by the shoulders, shake me violently, and say, “Fuck that asshole! It wasn’t your fault that he was a lying, cheating, abusive scumbag! You are better than this!”
Instead, I chose to turn to drugs.
It was easier, and I thought it would just make more sense. I spoke to my doctor of my paralyzing bouts of anxiety that I felt every time I thought of Him. I told him how I couldn’t get out of bed most mornings and how I had grown weak and thin due to my inability to eat. He just jotted down notes on his yellow legal pad like he’d heard my story countless times. I’d never taken medication before, and I was excited at the prospect of the magical little pills repairing the cracks in my fucked-up little situation. Ideally, I felt like I needed a full skin transplant—but perhaps a few mood stabilizers would do for now.
It was nothing new to me feeling gloomy in the wintertime, but this was different. It was desperate. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to be rid of the nagging hurt that clung to me like a straightjacket. So I took the prescribed pills and I waited.
The thing about antidepressants is that they work. After a few weeks of taking the tiny little pills, I no longer felt like I had the world collapsing around me. The problem that I came to encounter, however, was that I felt nothing at all. Suddenly, I could get out of bed, and eventually I began to eat again, but I felt like a spectator viewing myself in recovery from my position floating on the ceiling above myself. After weeks of this newfound numbness, I returned to my doctor and tried to tell him that I missed feeling things—the good things at least. His answer, of course, was to take some more pills in addition to the ones I was already taking. He said they’d just take the “zombie state” away and make me feel a little more lively. I opened the hatch and swallowed those, too, and waited for feelings to come back.
I waited for something to change, but even through the therapy and the pills, I was still held hostage by the city that loomed around me. I wondered what else I could do to stifle the process that was driving me crazy. Sadly, I could come up with no answers. I kept on my way and dragged myself through the big graveyard city and hoped that something, anything, would feel like home again.
Veselka
Categories: Diners, Ukrainian
Neighborhood: East Village
Comfort food has always been a New York thing.
Being that this city has been filled with people coming from all over the world to make their dreams come true, it’s hard to come by a native New Yorker these days. Especially in the winter, it can seem like one big lonely mass of orphans. Like moths to a flame, all of the orphans search long and far for something that makes them feel at home. Nine out of ten times, all it takes is a warm cup of soup and a sandwich to make you remember being at mom’s house.
Veselka has been a shining beacon of comfort amidst the cold embrace of Manhattan for the past sixty years. For me, it’s always been the embodiment of a really comfortable pair of jeans. Its casual ambience and unintentional ease has always felt like a warm hug to me. Like coming home, I think of cups of black coffee and piping hot pierogies and get all fuzzy feeling. There’s just something about it that I can’t put my finger on. Much like anything else in this city, it’s probably just all of the memories that fill the room.
We spend most of our lives here in Manhattan longing to find comfort. If we don’t find something that rings familiar, then we might as well be lost—just a long line of sickened immigrants trying to make it happen in a cold and foreign land. I’ve had several spots like this scattered all around downtown New York for the past thirteen years. I’ve found those spots that feel like home and made them my own, and I guess that’s what it means to make a life for oneself. I never expected it, but when I return to California for the holidays, I find myself yearning to be sitting at a booth in Veselka. Screw Mom’s homemade tamales. Now comfort food to me is a cup of matzo ball soup made by a large Ukrainian woman (probably) named Oksana.
Comfort is such a double-sided sword, though, isn’t it? Just when you get comfortable enough to really give yourself to another person, you begin to look slovenly, like you’ve given up. That was never the way with Him and I—I always pulled myself together for Him. Every time I went to pick Him up from work, I looked like I was ready to walk the runway, because I cared. We were comfortable, yes, but I never cracked a fart in front of Him the whole time we dated. I wanted to be sexy for Him in a way that I had never wanted before, and it terrified me. Perhaps true comfort is letting the other person see every single side of you, even if it’s not flattering. Even if it’s lukewarm soup, it still feels like home.
I awoke in a panic in Gramercy with a Shiba Inu staring down my nose and looking quizzically at me as if I had been snoring or something. I’d not seen Lola since she was a puppy, and that was nearly ten years ago. With a panic in my head I shot up out of bed and ran to collect my clothing. My phone had died, and splayed out on the bed like a ragdoll was a man who I had dated when I first moved to New York. No matter how distant I felt from him, it was oddly familiar to be back in his presence again after such a long hiatus. It was what I had sought out the minute I knew that The One would never want me the way I had wanted Him. It was comfort food. I ran wounded and flailing into the arms of someone who knew me for who I was, or at least used to be. No matter how wrong it felt, I did it because all I knew was that I wanted to be desired. All the while, it was Him in my head. Him in between every sentence uttered to my ex. Him begging and pleading for me to get him a cup of coffee. Him looking at me like his best friend. And most importantly, Him in the first real snow of the season that was coming down in buckets outside the picturesque window over 24th Street. It put a dent in my heart like I had never felt before in my entire life. I knew I had to escape immediately before I made a fool of myself.
Being comfortable suddenly had never felt more uncomfortable in my entire life. A pang of hunger resonated in my stomach, and I immediately felt an uncontrollable craving for pierogies.
As much as I hated it, I knew I had to make my way through the snow to the New York Public Library. A promise was a promise.
New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Category: Libraries
Neighborhood: Midtown East
I’ve never set foot inside of the New York Public Library in Midtown. I’ve always wondered if it is as grandiose on the inside as it is on the outside. All I’ve ever known about the inside of this building is that it was where Carrie Bradshaw was supposed to get married in the Sex and the City movie, and in typical New York bachelor fashion, her scumbag fiancé leaves her at the alta
r. In a building that is so full of history, it’s quite funny that this is my only point of reference. By funny, I mean sad. And by sad, I mean relatable.
Back when the nights were still somewhat warm from the dying ebb of summer, I came to sit under one of the great lion statues that sat guarding the library. It was the first night that I had spent with Him since he had decided that he didn’t want to see me anymore. Masochistic me, I had come running back into his company the moment he came to call. Although I knew he no longer wanted me, I had craved his company endlessly. After a month of not sleeping or eating and writing dozens of unsent letters to Him, it seemed like I was finally getting the chance for some closure. Or he was coming back. Who knew?
He sat me down on a bench beneath the southernmost lion and told me he had something for me. I sat hesitantly and waited for whatever crazy gesture he was going to sling my way. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a wedding ring or fifteen stabs to the chest—typical Him-style. He had always been good about surprises. It blew me away when he handed me his iPhone and played a video he had made for me. With ear buds in, I watched in complete shock as a video played of Him walking through all the places we had been together in the course of our brief affair. From the bar Von where we had our first date to the Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square Park, which he knew was my favorite place in the entire city. He had spent an entire day on foot revisiting our love and set the whole thing to music. I began to shake uncontrollably, and it was only a matter of seconds before I became hysterical.
I held Him, and he clung to me and kissed my tear-stained face. He told me that he loved me and that he was sorry. In my fragile state, I actually believed Him when he said it was all going to be all right.
The funny thing is, it actually was all right after that. We both said we were sorry and continued our beautiful love like it had been actually fortified by our time apart. He said he would appreciate every second I was back in his life like it was a gift, and I said I would always love and want Him. After the tears subsided, we went back to being the most in-love couple New York City had ever seen. I was sideswiped by how thankful I was that he had returned, and it seemed like it had finally sunk in that we were destined to be together.
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