I sat in the backseat of my grandmother’s car, wearing the headphones I had gotten for Christmas and watching the green-smothered Alabama roadside pass by my window. It smelled of mildew, of decade-old fabric car seats that had been baking in the sticky southern heat every day for years, a smell embedded so deep even the crisp AC pouring out from the dash couldn’t push it away. My dad sat in front of me in the passenger seat. He had been divorced from my mother and living with his own for two years; I was thirteen, visiting him from Michigan for the summer with my siblings.
“If you were here beside me / Instead of in New York …”
I was dreaming of a boy back home in Michigan. He was tall, sweet and funny — my first love. I missed him. So, I turned to music. “New York” by Snow Patrol was a new addition to my library. It helped me to imagine him more vividly, to get as close as I could in my head to the real thing.
“If the curve of you was curved on me / I’d tell you that I loved you / Before I even knew you.”
The song is simple but dramatic, warm and dark. Gary Lightbody’s voice circles around you like satin ribbon being pulled through the air, curving into beautiful, captivating shapes and rippling like water. It’s a poetic, tragic song: one about leaving, waiting and a love so intense that it feels fated. There was no one I loved in New York, but I felt it just the same. The city was a placeholder for wherever my love had gone, even if the small Midwestern town I was thinking of was nothing like it.
“Come on, come out / Come here, come here.”
As summer turned into fall, I went home to Michigan and my love for that first boy died out. I started to miss my dad instead. He didn’t call me every night like he used to when he had first moved away. The song became about him — that profound loss of the man who had impacted me so deeply, my soul might as well have borne his name instead of my own. I had been left in the biggest way I could ever imagine.
“There’s distance and there’s silence / But your words have never left me / They’re the prayer that I say every day.”
The chorus begs, over and over again: “Come here.” When I sang that plea over the crescendo of stunning instrumentals, I meant it. My voice mixed with Lightbody’s in the mud of grief that is loving someone who is gone but still alive, a grief that is the same whether you’re mourning someone in New York City or on the Gulf Coast. There’s a different kind of ache when you miss someone like they’re dead but they’re not: to know that they’re out there, somewhere in the world, living and breathing and choosing every day not to come home to you. So, I sang, a hopeless wish heard only by the walls of my bedroom: “Come here, come here.” I sang about New York, all the time.
“If you were here beside me / Instead of in New York / In the arms you said you’d never leave …”
Seven summers later, I’m still singing about New York — about people who aren’t even there but aren’t here with me, either. I have been left by the living many times over. They go to Ann Arbor or Alabama or even just a house the next block over. They go to many different places, but they all go. When I put on my headphones and press play, New York isn’t New York. It just isn’t here.
“I’ll always remember picking up my favorite records from your apartment / Kissing you before you left me for New York.”
“Heaven Is a Bedroom” by TV Girl paints a picture of stubborn, deluded love, just like the kind of love I’ve adopted in response to so many reluctant endings. The song is funky and upbeat, capturing the distinct insanity of being unable to let go. In it, the narrator laments a relationship that was akin to “salvation” until it ended. Some may see that as an exaggeration, but I don’t. Love has always felt religious and sacred to me. Next to it, New York seems so small. All I can see in it are hollow, lonely streets, a lifetime of peering around corners for your lover just to find cold concrete. How could you pick such a superficial thing over love’s divinity? How could you pick anything, or anywhere, over love?
“I was nervous that this was good as I could ever feel / And I was right.”
I don’t understand it, how people leave so easily. How do you let go of love — real love, love that alters you to your core and makes you feel like you’ve found the meaning of life, like your particular reason for living has always been to love like this? I’ve never known how to give that up, even for something as wonderful as the Empire City. My dad says he stays in Alabama, even now that his parents have passed on, because he can’t take the cold up here. What’s colder: Michigan winters or no longer knowing your daughter?
“New York City’s cold and when you love someone / You should hold onto them so tightly / ‘Til you crush them, or they wriggle from your grasp.”
New York is a glittering, hopeful place, somewhere better than wherever its people came from — or it’s supposed to be. At the very least, it’s far away and out of reach. Somewhere they can go, but I can’t — maybe because the rent is too high, or maybe because what they’re really looking for is a place without me in it. And I can’t escape myself. We choose New York to be that place simply because it makes for a prettier story. It makes the abandonment seem closer to worth it, imagining that they ran off to brilliance. The truth is, though, leaving is still leaving, no matter where they go. But no one wants to sing about it when it’s not New York, when it’s a leaving that’s uglier, with less color. It’d hurt too much to remember that they didn’t leave me for bustling streets and skyscrapers full of nothing but opportunity; they left for things much smaller than that.
“Then you can come with me,” says Allie.
“To New York?” responds Noah.
“Yes.”
I had never noticed before now that in “The Notebook,” Allie (Rachel McAdams, “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret”) leaves Noah (Ryan Gosling, “The Fall Guy”) for New York. I only ever knew that she left. The script only says “New York” three times. It only matters that she went to New York because it was somewhere Noah couldn’t go. It only matters that she went away and gave him up. But as I rewatched it this summer, the fact that she left for the city struck me. It made her leaving feel different.
“What am I going to do in New York?” says Noah.
“Be with me?”
“Yeah … I don’t know.”
I originally saw Allie as a girl who was just doing what she had to because of her parents, something she couldn’t avoid. But once I paid more attention to where she was going, I felt angry at her. I took it personally. The connotations in my mind of someone leaving for New York instead of any other place are heavy with selfishness and the undervaluation of love. I’m not saying it’s not important to chase your dreams, but to do it without any mind for what you’re leaving behind — I can’t fathom it. My mental picture of New York has been conflated with images of the real-life places my love has gone. It doesn’t sparkle anymore; it feels pillowy and hot, wrapped thickly in tan fabric car seats and damp. It smells of mildew. To place love below a thing like that on your list of priorities is shameful.
“It is over,” says Fin.
“No,” says Allie.
“Leave it alone. Let it go.”
Art often tells the story of the person who left for the city — it rarely shows what they left behind. But when I find the art that does, I hold it close. I take the side of the deserted, always relating to the people mourning the past rather than those walking into bright, concrete-jungle futures; I can’t help but see everything they’re walking away from. New York is still a hopeful, exciting place, a place I very well might live someday. But before that, it’s something that takes. I’ve sung its name over and over again in jealousy and hurt, “New York” escaping from my lips when in my head I think Alabama, Michigan, gone away. My songs have made me hate that place: New York, the city of endings.
Daily Arts Writer Audrey Hollenbaugh can be reached at aehollen@umich.edu.
