When I lived in New York for about ten days, I really got to missing my old Somerville neighborhood a whole lot. I tried to share the nostalgia with new friends, but they would constantly berate me for my inability to "heart" New York.
"But you don't understand!" I would tell them. "Boston and New York are so completely different! There is no Harvard Square in New York!" But they would only gesture around to wherever we were and talk about how much said place had to offer. And I think they were right, there IS so much more in New York, and that's why I didn't like it, because I was so used to Boston's underachievements as a city.
What I really couldn't get used to was the size of the city. I naively thought that living in Brooklyn would be like living in Somerville, the desirable areas of Boston and Cambridge only a hop skip away. But no. In Greenpoint, Brooklyn, it seemed as if there was a secret plot to keep me from getting to Manhattan on weekends and late nights. The G train was the worst. Aside from smelling like radioactive poo half the time, it would run on the wrong side of the tracks, and only come about every three hours. So, I would sit and sit and wait for the train, usually spotting at least one heart-stoppingly humongous monkey-rat in the meantime, and when the train finally came it would be going in the wrong direction. Someone wrote on one of the poles at my stop, "The G creates nothing but misery," and sometimes that line still runs through my mind. Like if I am waiting in line to use the bathroom at a bar, and my bladder is so full it is bringing tears to my eyes, I will think, "The G creates nothing but misery."
If you could even get into Manhattan, once you were there you had to be wearing orthopedic shoes to even survive a single day of "fun." I walked a lot in Boston, but for some reason in New York my feet always hurt. And wherever I was things just usually didn't look nice. Soho shops were crawling with tourists no matter the time, day, or weather. Sometimes I think that the one place that I loved in New York was Washington Square Park (original, I know). It felt how I thought New York should feel, like movie New York and book New York and poetry New York felt (you know fake, unrealistic, and idealized).
I also want to point out that although everyone in New York was always talking about how unfriendly people in Boston are, and how every one in Boston has a "chip on the shoulder," I have never had so many strangers be mean to me until I lived in New York. Like the shop guy who chased me into the street after he sexually harassed me in his store, which in turn made me flip him off (lesson learned: don't flip off people in New York, even if they are doing something as awful as harassing you while you are innocently shopping. They might be crazy, real crazy).
Anyway.
When I used to come back to Somerville to stay with Luke during my hiatus, I would be so stupidly, moronishly happy to be in Somerville. I mean it's only Somerville, but it felt like MY Somerville. I used to pretend that the people in Union Square were marchers in a parade, and Luke and I would sing this song (pretending that they were singing it to us): "WE ARE THE Somerville people and we're marching along! YES WE ARE! We're marching right along." And so on. It made me happy every time.
not the Somerville people parade
