This was why I knew that we would never get our happy ending: I was an optimist, believe it or not. I saw the glass half full. He wanted to take the glass and throw it against a wall.
After he left me, he began a new relationship almost immediately. Quite honestly, it didn’t shock me in the slightest. This had been the reason that we had never stood a chance to begin with: his constant desire to be validated by other men. When we first tried to end our relationship over Thanksgiving, it had been because of this same innate desire of his. I had casually looked in his laptop that he left open at my house. He had been acting oddly strange and distant, and I knew from experience when something was amiss. It broke me completely to find that he had been carrying on several conversations and happenings with a handful of other men. Messages to ex-lovers, flirtations with men around the city, and graphic and explicit texts that were quite blatantly deceit. I had known since the beginning that this was something he was capable of and that I would never make an honest man out of Him. I had chosen not to believe it because my love for Him was so strong.
When confronted, he confessed to cheating on me. I didn’t know how to handle it, so that was why I fled to California. I left Him there on Minetta Lane as he slunk into a ball of hysteric sobbing not because he lost me, but because he couldn’t have his cake and eat it too. I couldn’t believe that my ardent love wasn’t enough for Him. What I came to learn was that nothing would ever be enough for Him. That was a reality he would have to take with Him for the rest of his life.
Although he had found a new lover, he came knocking at my door constantly. He would send me text messages telling me how much he missed me as he was sitting across the dinner table from his new boyfriend. He would show up drunkenly at my work and sometimes in front of my apartment late at night. It was a nonstop barrage of emotional hardship, and I didn’t know how to escape it. Because I still loved Him, for some reason or another, I let it continue to happen for a while. I couldn’t understand why I had thought that his constant emotional abuse was acceptable for so long. In the end, the only thing I could come up with was that love makes people actually lose their damn minds.
At long last, springtime eventually came to Manhattan. After I found myself on the Brooklyn Bridge, I could feel that my mind was clearing and I was finally starting to see things as they really were. I felt at once liberated from the shackles of winter and the shackles of Him. I no longer hated Him for finding a new lover or for all the times he had sought out new lovers while he was still with me. If anything, I felt truly sorry for Him and his inability to be happy with just one man—even if it was just me being the one man who wasn’t enough for Him. Sure, maybe I wasn’t the best for Him. I’d never be one of the muscle men he lusted after on Instagram or one of the scumbags he talked to on Grindr behind my back or an ex-lover who still sent Him dick pics as a friendly reminder on Facebook. I’d never be rich like the man he left me for.
I came to realize that maybe it wasn’t Him that had been the downfall of our story. Maybe it was me who was asking too much of the wrong person. It was me who had wanted things that he simply did not. And what was the matter with that?
None of it mattered to me anymore. I was me, and he was Him. I had to be okay with me to finally understand that our love had been nothing more than a changing of seasons, the falling of leaves, and the snow that in the end makes the first blossoms of spring worth it all.
I think the big lesson that needed to be learned was that not every love story has a fairytale ending. No matter how much you love someone, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will love you in return. Him and I had completely different needs, and I came to understand that was okay. I needed loyalty and honesty to make me satisfied, and he needed to sow his wild oats. After all, it was his first full year in New York City. I had been there from the start to finish of it, and it was easy to see how wild that must have been for Him. He needed to find his own Manhattan just like I had when I first arrived here all wide-eyed with wonder and hope for the possibility of finding The One. It sucked that I was not the one for Him, but it finally began to make sense.
Is it possible to have someone be your soulmate if you aren’t theirs? Could the stars be fickle enough to even consider letting that be a possibility? I had to brush the stars from my eyes and begin to think about my heart from a rational point of view.
I decided to stop Yelping when the spring came. I knew that it was time to stop living in the past and trying to resuscitate a love that was struggling to take its dying breath. The hardest part, however, was the thought that our seasonal love affair had finally come full circle; now was supposed to be the time where we came to our theoretical blossoming. The boats were back, and the fireflies and the ice creams.
He decided to leave New York that summer. Just as soon as he had come, he was whisked away by his lust for life that had enraptured me to begin with. Almost like a prophecy, my timeline and his met exactly in the middle. He had a new life to live, and so did I. So I came up with a plan. I had to find a way to write my happy ending, this time without Him.
I desperately waited for my Eat, Pray, Love moment.
My problem was that I was a stubborn son of a bitch. I thought that if I just pushed harder, loved harder, and tried harder, that it would eventually work out. Eventually, he broke up with the guy he moved on to and decided to take a summer job in the Hamptons, where he met another man who he fell immediately in love with. After the summer, he would move back to California or (as fate would have it) Paris. As he took to a new start in the Hamptons, I decided to take a new start where the heart of the matter had come from: Manhattan.
I revisited all of the places I had Yelped about as the days went on. I learned how to have breakfast at French Roast without wanting to die. The warmth of springtime led me to Sundaes and Cones for my taro root ice cream, and I looked at the famous poop cake over in the display case and just smiled. I only ordered one scoop this time, and I took it for a walk through the East Village and tried to hum a happy song. With Him gone from the island, and soon from New York entirely, I decided that I would take back the places and the things that I thought he had taken away from me.
Finally, I started to learn how to eat again. Although I still constantly craved the comfort of my signature meal at Café Mogador, I started to walk down 9th Street instead of Saint Mark’s when looking to take lunch. I tried new places, and much to my surprise found that eventually I started to taste the food again. It didn’t taste like sawdust anymore, and the most astounding thing that I noticed was that I actually grew to become hungry. This blew my mind.
Hunger is the strangest thing.
No one can escape it, and it’s one thing in life that will always be absolute. Hunger is Desire’s sister, and she knows your name and your address. Hunger can be a yearning for a person, or it can be a desire to take something new into your life. Suddenly, I felt a hunger return that I had forgotten even existed. It was the hunger in its most human and mortal form. I wanted a cheeseburger. And I wanted it so badly that my mouth began to water.
I walked with no direction and an open mind. New York City was littered with hundreds of places where one can get a mind-blowing cheeseburger, and probably a few of them hadn’t ever been haunted by the ghost of my failed relationship. In my headphones, Sinead O’Connor’s new song was on full blast, and I remember the words that turned my direction for the rest of my life.
I don’t wanna love the way I loved before
I don’t wanna love that way no more
What have I been writing love songs for?
I don’t want to write ’em anymore
I don’t wanna sing from where I sang before
I don’t wanna sing that way no more
What have I been singing love songs for?
I don’t wanna sing them anymore
I don’t wanna be that girl no more
I don’t wanna cry no more
I don’t wanna die no more
; So cut me down from this here tree
Cut the rope from off of me
Set me on the floor
I’m the only one I should adore
As I walked with the spring breeze blowing lightly on my skin, I found myself steadily gaining momentum. My walk became a stride, my gait became a jog, and suddenly I found myself running down Prince Street. I artfully dodged through the hordes of tourists and SoHo shoppers as I weaved my way into the heart of downtown.
I stopped in the middle of Broadway and watched as tourists and chic women in black dresses and businessmen in exquisitely tailored suits flocked into Dean & Deluca on the corner. Out of breath from my sudden sprint, I reached into my pocket to fish for my phone. I opened the Yelp app and typed in the word “cheeseburger.” At this, I smiled.
Oh.
So that’s what that’s for.
I turned back from where I had just run from and didn’t think twice about it. Covered in sweat and still listening to my song, I made my way to a restaurant called Little Prince for the first time. That day I had what was probably one of the best cheeseburgers of my entire life: the French Onion Soup burger, with grilled onions and Emmental cheese. I would say it was a solid five-star worthy bit of heaven.
I know he would have loved it.
I knew I’d be coming back to Little Prince often to enjoy my new spot. It made me happy to know that I didn’t have to Yelp about it. Plus, if word got out that they had New York’s best burger, I’d never be able to score a table so easily. Let’s keep this one to ourselves. Don’t tell a soul about it.
My review for the first lunch of the rest of my life didn’t need to be Yelped or screamed or whispered seductively into the ear of the most handsome man on earth. It didn’t need to end in a tearful fight that made the waitress nervous. It was just me and my burger, in my city, with the memory of a love so strong that it nearly made me lose my appetite. That’s not an easy thing to do, as any of my closest friends will tell you. I’m a hungry guy, and apparently I’m a professional at this kind of thing. All that needed to be said was that, at that point, everything was delicious.
And finally, I was full.
Epilogue: Yaffa Café
ANOTHER ONE BIT THE DUST.
Yaffa Café had been one of my most frequented restaurants in New York City for over a decade, and now it was just another faded memory that would be lost in the mire of my timeline. For fourteen years, I had gone to the café at odd hours of the night to sit and celebrate with the people I had come to collect in my life as a New Yorker. Holidays, birthdays, post-shift binge eating, and first dates had all had their moments in that garishly decorated room brimming with the electric and eccentric buzz that the East Village used to radiate. This place felt like my living room, and I felt as if it had watched me grow from a post-punk street urchin teenager into the man I was today.
It’s that notion of progress that I’ve watched for years as the places I once held sacred vanished from the topography of my love affair with New York. Restaurants, for me, were the markers of my own evolution into what I was to become. Yaffa’s “Open All Night” opulence and 7A’s comforting kitsch were reflections of the once-whimsical heart that I grew living in downtown Manhattan at a point in history where no one was sure where our whole story was going to end. Me and her—Manhattan, that is.
We weren’t the same anymore. A place like Yaffa was meant to live in a time before hashtags and selfies and Yelp reviews. It was a place that was meant to be a kind of secret—a little window into a world that existed after the bars closed and the lights went up and would still take you in and stuff you full of hummus and fill you with too much cheap Pinot Noir until you were imbued with the neon pink glow of delirium that the place forced upon your senses. In those glossy red banquettes, I had deep belly laughs with the friends I had collected here, and a good cry or two over stuff that didn’t matter anymore, and kisses with boys whose names I couldn’t even remember. These were my carrot-ginger flavored memories that would stay with me for the rest of my days.
I sat outside of Yaffa Café on a brisk fall day and stared at the skeleton that it had become. The lights were all off, and some of the furniture had been placed outside of the patio wrapped in cellophane. My immediate reaction was to plunder—just grab a piece of something so that I could have a physical reminder of this place that was going extinct. Like I could hold a fork or coffee mug from the place and feel as if I had a jabberwocky claw in my hand. In the end, I resisted. With a heavy heart, I turned my back and walked on Saint Mark’s to Tompkins Square Park.
It had been almost a year since the world had come to a crashing halt on that horrible day in November—Thanksgiving. So much had changed, and I could barely recognize the world I once lived in, and for this I was not sure if I should be thankful. Certain parts of the city that I’d once cherished had become distant memories, and new places that I’d discovered had become illuminated in a new light. On my own, I felt like Columbus once again, discovering a brave new world; one already inhabited by natives who looked on at me puzzled and confused as to what I was doing there. Being single again was something that I had to learn anew, but I did not expect it to be as foreign a feeling as it was. As a naturally (and fiercely) independent person, I had hoped that I could swing back into my natural stride like I’d not been changed by the whole matter that had brought me to my newfound state of emotional numbness. Alas, I just moved on like any rational-minded individual would do. With new eyes and my feet on the ground, I knew it was time to start over.
I thought about California a lot around that time. I daydreamed of returning to the canyons of Malibu and hiking to peaks overlooking the ocean and foraging for prickly pears with which to make fresh margaritas for me and my family. I dreamed of being a stranger again in a foreign land not haunted by the memories of another relationship gone awry. For the first time in what seemed like forever, I began to grow weary of all the things about Manhattan that had once brought me joy. Although in my heart of hearts I loved everything about her, I felt as if I had to let go completely to understand why any of it had mattered in the first place.
Although I had hoped to write a study on falling in love, it was evident that there was a bigger lesson to learn in all of this. It’s easy to fall in love in Manhattan—everyone’s doing it. Movies, books, television shows, and plays have all been born of the magical spark that comes when one falls in love here. There’s no doubt that it’s a special place that makes the heart act like a hummingbird on crack. The real lesson that I had to learn in my years spent on this island was how to let go.
I let go of my fears and dove straight into a love that threatened to destroy me. I let go of a man who would never have the same love for me that I had for him, even though it was the hardest thing that I had ever done. I knew that it was only a matter of time before I had to let go of New York if I ever wanted to grow.
Although my love for the city was evident, it no longer posed any challenges for me. I’d conquered it, in a way. I learned every nook and cranny of the beautiful West Village, every spot from which to catch a beautiful sunset or share an intimate glass of wine with a person I adored. Every bagel I ate for breakfast, no matter how expertly crafted, tasted the same. I just wanted to fall in love again, and seeing that I was nowhere near ready to fall in love with another man, then I would have to fall in love again with a new city. I began to wonder which was more important to me: my love for someone else or my love for myself and wherever I chose to rest my head.
My relationship with him had only lasted the better part of a year, and yet my love affair with New York had lasted nearly fourteen. New York showed up when I called and never left me high and dry. It terrified me to leave, but I knew that I had to give myself another shot at finding myself and my heart. The waves were calling, and to them I would answer and give my all, just as I had with the concrete monster known as Manhattan.
I quit my job that fall and decided to go.
I gave
up my apartment on Minetta that I had dreamed of living in all of my young life. I was suddenly overcome with waves of memories from when I first moved to the city and used to haunt the street that had now become my home. I recalled sitting at the long-deceased Café Esperanto on Macdougal Street, chain smoking and writing poetry in my little black journal, daydreaming of what it would be like to live in this magical place. Although it took many years to see it all come to fruition, I did one day endure long enough to see my dreams come true.
That’s the funny part about seeing your dreams come true: once they do, we’re foolish enough to ask for more. This is perhaps not the worst fate, and to settle for a life without wanting more could have been the death of me. Surely I could have stayed in the West Village, living, loving, and working until I became old and stagnant. It could have been a beautiful life. But I would have always wondered what could have been if I took the other road.
In the end, it all comes back to love. I wondered if I could ever love a city as much as I had loved New York, and this made me wonder if I could ever love another man as much as I had loved him. There was only one way to find out, and so I packed my bags and prepared to embark on a new love story. I’d said it before, and I knew it to be true that the best part of a love story is always the beginning—that’s where all the hope is. Hope for finding The One. Hope for completing my heart. Hope for a life that was fulfilling and would not let me down in the end.
New York would always be there if I ever found I’d made the wrong decision. And should that happen, perhaps I would return there with a changed perspective—maybe moving to, I don’t know, Queens or something bonkers like that, which would make my head spin. I knew that I wasn’t closing any doors, only opening new ones.
The Yelp Page 13