One of my oldest friends was laid off last May from a firm she’d been working with since we graduated in the late 90s. She decided, after securing commitments from friends to join, to use her severance to splurge on a month-long sabbatical in New York’s Chelsea neighbourhood.

I was one of the friends.

COVID-19 had shrunk my world to about two square kilometres and my nervous system had not received the credible critical intelligence it needed to fully stand down, so saying yes to a week in a city of 16 million was a personal intervention. Leaving my partner and ten-year-old for ten whole days was in itself breaking news. (Headline: Doing Something By Myself For Myself.)

Your oldest friends carry an inherent loyalty to earlier versions of your self, which got me wondering if I was going to encounter 20-year-old me, perched on the steps of the New York Central Library, orphaned and choked that it had taken this long to make good on getting here. So, myths and legends, lingering pandemic anxiety, and unfinished business, were all in the suitcase that rolled out of Newark Airport and onto the Pennsylvania Station bound train.

Before you can write, or live, a story, you need the setting. And New York has proven its reliability. The city’s iconography is unpacked and laid bare at the Museum of the City of New York, with a brilliant hyper-cut multiscreen edit of scenes from films, shot in New York, over the past hundred years. The low profile museum has to compete with the luminaries of MOMA and the Met, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Cooper Hewitt (Smithsonian Design Museum) or the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, but it’s worth a subway ride to Central Park North, East Harlem, for its explanation of the city’s perpetual allure: creativity, capital, density and diversity as the thrumming percussive bass lines set beneath every experience, ensuring your wavering little solo contribution is never thin, is always scored by the bigger soundtrack, of a story that keeps on looping, telling itself to itself. 

Even the 9/11 Museum does this – tells the story of that day in 2001, in time stamped moments, slow-lowering you into a state of deep reflection, as you walk down into the Twin Towers’ former foundations, the unfillable hole. We all experienced the shock and subsequent reverberations of two planes flying into the Twin Towers, triggering their collapse, but through the 9/11 Museum’s exhibits and artefacts, it becomes a very New York-specific story – what it was like to be at Ground Zero, that day and in the immediate aftermath.

At MOMA, I do the thing with art that Oliver Burkeman made famous in his book 4000 Weeks: just sit in front of one piece of work, for an hour or more. It will transform you more than racing through the museum trying to check off every exhibit. Maybe it was cheating to pick a piece that’s alive.  Refik Anadol’s installation, Unsupervised, is hailed as the first AI-generated art, an intelligent machine digesting, regurgitating, interpreting, the Museum’s 200 year-rich collection. The 24 by 24 foot screen dominates the lobby mesmerising crowds who are universally compelled to film pieces of the piece on their phones, crowding the cloud with replicants of this AI-generated phenomena where presumably future AI will spit out cultural offerings made up of these images of images of images. 

That meta sense of self-referencing layers is quintessentially New York – I’ve absorbed so much of the city through film and popular culture that much feels vaguely familiar. When I could drift, porous and dreamy, through streets and museums and lurching subway rides, it was as if my creative self was being fed raw nutrients. That creative self was an easy mark. Near Times Square, my wrist was snagged by a robed monk who “gave” me some bracelets and the promise of peace prayers for an obligatory donation of $50. He did not want to let me go, but I pressed the bracelets back on him even though I had wanted them as a blessing from the ceaseless city, some sign I was meant to be here. But the city exacts its tolls.  (As my brother-in-law warned, New York has a way of making money flow out of your pockets.) A toothless man high on something howled and monkeyed before me, before telling me I should smoke more weed. An older gentleman told me I was beautiful and when I smiled instead of scowling, he took his opening to solicit for some kind of food bank.  Those were the moments I thought I am not meant for this place. 

But there’s a reason the Humans of New York Instagram feed has 13 million followers – that seething morphing flowing sea of humanity is so fascinating. All those stories. Like how Jackie Onassis lobbied to have the derelict Grand Central train station renovated, instead of replaced by another high rise office tower. Or Joshua David and Robert Hammond, who pitched the idea that the High Line, the elevated train tracks that were scheduled for demolition, be allowed to rewild, as was already occurring, and become a strip of public parkland. It’s now a continuous 1.45 mile greenway, interspersed with art installations, streaming always with enchanted travelers and nourishing bees. Both are landmarks, both reminders of the power of an individual, to rally other individuals, to come together and create something amazing, new stories out of old stories, the ongoing cycle of digestion and regurgitation, collapse and recreation, that we all somehow are part of.  

At the Museum of the City of New York, I learned that the 400-year-old city of Manhattan began as a Dutch colony, situated on the territory of the Lenape people. How familiar is this story of Turtle Island conquests, repeated over and again, on every coast and corner of this continent. A lost ship looking for a sneaky way to the spice lands, spies land. “Natives” board, fit and beautiful and draped in furs. Furs mean transportable wealth. Sticking your flag in the ground, apparently means this land now belongs to your boss/king/patron. Trade, disease and murder are a package deal. 400 years later, the beavers are long gone. Did any Lenape make it out of “the city” alive? These stories were continually re-enacted across the continent, by different ships, different empires, different flag-stakers, all apparently mad about top hats. 

We have to be careful what we choose to tell ourselves, over and over, as we create and recreate our myths and legends. What will we feed the future? 

I came to New York with one eye open for my 20-year-old self, the girl in my back pocket, whose ideas about the future I’d abandoned when I stayed in the mountains instead of throwing myself at the world’s great literary cities, but as it turns out, she and I are one and the same. We found places she loves – libraries, Broadway theatres, pizza joints, three story bookstores, vegan night markets in Central Park, exhibits about women artists, exploring dots and lines and form and making art in the midst of motherhood, gardens to drink coffee in that were once orchards owned by writers, and came home all filled up.

I wrote this piece at the behest of the travel editor of the Vancouver Sun but he’d been anticipating something a little more Sex and the City, of gal pals, gone wild, with high heels and cocktails, so it’s been lolling in my own slush pile for a few months as I mulled over how to rewrite it more to what he’d hoped, which I just realized, I can’t, because I don’t even own high heels, and the cocktails we enjoyed were completely oriented to bookstores, and in some ways, time with your 20 year old self and the art of Ruth Asawa and your oldest girlfriends are just too sacred to spin into travel anecdotes, which is probably exactly why I’m not a travel writer and not likely to become one.