I Blame Carrie Bradshaw for My Unrealistic Expectations of New York.

Carmen Román Mallén

6 hours ago

4 min read

If your first thought was New York City: Congratulations! You are right.

I don’t remember the first time I fell in love with New York. I know it wasn’t the first time I visited, because by then I already knew many names on this little island. Maybe I was seven when I first heard of Manhattan, watching Home Alone and deciding that Christmas was supposed to happen here. Maybe I was fifteen, watching How I Met Your Mother. Or twenty-three, watching Friends. Twenty-five, watching Sex and the City. Or maybe I was twenty-eight, reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids and understanding that New York was where creative minds escaped to, where people went to disappear, create, fall in love, make something of themselves. Maybe it wasn’t any of these things. Maybe it was the second I had my first bite of a PopUp Bagels bagel on the Upper East Side, or finally broke in half a half-baked (fittingly enough) Levain cookie.

Perhaps it was all the incredibly nice girls on the street who compliment you as if their lives depend on it, or just how friendly people seemed to be in general. It all made me feel at home. Or, at least, it made me feel like I knew this place. Which is ridiculous, because I don’t. But somehow, I do? Every street seems familiar. Every yellow taxi. The art at MoMA, the steps of the Met, the pizza slices, every fire escape where I have seen so many people hide and leave and kiss and start over. The places where Holly Golightly sang Moon River. The café where JFK and Carolyn used to have breakfast. I recognise places I have never been.

It’s like I have spent my whole life collecting tiny little pieces of this city through films and books and pop culture and TV shows, and now I am finally walking through all of them at once. New York has existed in my imagination for so long that sometimes it feels less like travelling and more like stepping inside something I have already seen. A street corner becomes a scene. A building becomes a memory that technically isn’t mine. A yellow cab disappears down an avenue and, for a second, I feel like I am watching a movie I have watched a hundred times. Except this time I am in it. And maybe that is the strangest thing about New York: how familiar it can feel before you have any right to feel familiar with it.

It’s weird to think you can fall in love with a place. You can fall in love with a person; we’ve all been there, but not all of us fall in love with a place, especially a city. And even fewer people can say they fell in love with a city before they had ever been there. Maybe that’s what New York has always been for me. It wasn’t really a place on a map. It was a feeling I kept finding in different stories, with different characters, in different versions of myself. It was Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler and Ross.

Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha. It was Andie teaching all of us how to lose a guy in ten days, or Blair getting married in Central Park. It was Robert and his studio on Bond Street. It was Spider-Man rescuing MJ from whatever impossible situation she had found herself in this time. It was Christmas in Manhattan, friendship in a West Village apartment, artists trying to make it, strangers falling in love, people running away and starting again. Maybe New York had been with me all along.

Looking back, it makes perfect sense that I had decided years ago that I wanted to turn thirty in New York. I had made this dream such a big deal because, for as long as I could remember, I had imagined the city as the backdrop to a life I might one day have. So where else would I want to mark the beginning of a new decade? Perhaps my boyfriend understood that better than I did, which is why he proposed to me at the Guggenheim.

Or maybe that’s why I have never been more sad to leave a place. There was something almost unfair about having to go home after finally getting to live, even briefly, inside a city I had been carrying around with me for most of my life. I had spent years imagining what it would feel like to be there, and then suddenly I was: walking its streets, getting lost in the subway, drinking overpriced coffee, pretending I was a local, trying not to look up at the Louis Vuitton building every time I walked past it. All those tiny, stupid, wonderful things suddenly felt worth it.

And maybe that’s the thing about places we romanticise. We spend so much time imagining that they will change us that we forget they don’t actually know who we are. New York didn’t make me more creative, or more independent, or more interesting. It didn’t turn me into the person I thought I might become when I first saw Manhattan on a television screen. It simply gave all the versions of myself I had imagined somewhere to exist at the same time. The city I had built in my head was never entirely real, but neither was it entirely fictional. It was made from every book I had read, every film I had watched, every character I had loved, every dream I had attached to the idea of leaving and starting over. Maybe I wasn’t really in love with New York before I visited it. Maybe I was in love with everything I believed could happen there.

I am currently manifesting a move to New York (although, technically, I have been manifesting it my whole life). Not forever. Just long enough to get sick of it. But, knowing me, maybe forever will be enough.