Hello, Old Friend — Suzey Ingold

The first thing I see is the Empire State Building.

It’s already evening, a couple of hours later than I had expected to reach the city. After being turned around before landing at Newark and flying from Toronto to New York twice in the space of an afternoon, we had finally landed to a cotton candy sunset settling over the cityscape.

Hello, old friend.

It was cold out; that bitter Manhattan wind that creeps up the streets from the water’s edge that I had forgotten about in the two years since my last visit. I fall back on muscle memory on how to navigate this city. On how to dodge around throngs of people like I hadn’t seen in such a long time. The lights twinkled above my head, guiding my passage, even as I put enough distance between me and Penn Station to lose the crowds.

I hadn’t much time to think about having made it there, nor to process it. The delay had scuppered my evening plans and left me with only a little time to dash back across the city, shove my food in my mouth, and make it to the theatre in time for an eight o’clock show.

The one place that seemed very much alive? Broadway.

Maybe it helped, that it wasn’t my first trip since travel reopened. I had already had my moments of uncertainty, or adjusting to being around people again. Sitting in a sold-out theatre, rising to a stand ovation with the crowd, it seemed a quiet luxury to not feel worried. The performers sang a few last lines that felt as much for us, as audience, as for the show itself.

I found myself wiping away tears. Perhaps, at the show, a theatrical delight; perhaps, as much, at the very feeling of sitting in a crowded theatre again, enjoying art with a few hundred strangers. Either way, it was a fiddly task without disrupting my mask. As the last performer walked toward the wings, he caught my eye where I was stood in the front row of the mezzanine. He smiled softly and raised his cup to me.

I can’t spend time in New York without thinking back to the nervous young thing I was on my first solo trip there, in summer 2013. I had been to the city before but with no one but myself for company and for guidance, it was an entirely new, strange land. I spent two weeks being intimidated by the bustling streets and the cry of sirens, by the thrum of the subway beneath my feet and the crush of downtown.

New York is a place I’ve returned to many times over the years and, each time, I am slightly changed while the city remains (mostly) the same. But I also think New York is a part of that change. It’s a part of my journey, even in only in the occasional days or weeks I spend there.

Travelling to New York, like all the travel I have done solo, has been such an enriching part of my life. It has shaped the way I view the world, and the way I view myself. It has sparked my self-confidence and taught me to trust in myself and my decisions above all else. When faced with the unknown, with no one to ask for help, you discover who you are and what you are capable of.

Places like New York, or Paris where I was in the summer, are just slipping into another skin for a while, at this point. They are carving out a spot in whatever neighbourhood I’m staying in and finding my rhythm, for however short or long a time I am there. They are small moments, not grand adventures, but it is in these moments that I rediscover myself. When I remember parts of me I might have forgotten.

A new neighbourhood for me, but one I quickly got to know the way arounds of.

I walked home late on Tuesday night with my knees still shaking from the sensation of a bass line reverberating through the floor – a feeling forgotten to the past two years. It was quiet out – if there is one thing that has changed about the city, at least to my eye, it was how quiet it was in the evenings. The city that never sleeps seems to be hibernating for the season.

The few people I passed didn’t spare me much of a glance, didn’t do a double-take even as I sauntered down Lexington Ave in sparkly rainbow flares. There is a part of me that couldn’t exist in the small city I grew up in, where my bizarre collection of patterned shirts were too loud, where even my ambitions were seen as too big by most people. In travel, in places like New York, I learned to become everything I could be and to adjust my location to myself. Not the other way around.

On my last night in New York as I brushed my teeth, I realised I could just see the Empire State Building from my bathroom. Tucked almost out of sight by the building in front, its lights twinkled in the inky blue of the night sky.

I’ll see you again, I’m sure.