\n
I sat in the backseat of my grandmother\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you were here beside me \/ Instead of in New York \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
I was dreaming of a boy back home in Michigan. He was tall, sweet and funny \u2014 my first love. I missed him. So, I turned to music. \u201cNew York\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the curve of you was curved on me \/ I\u2019d tell you that I loved you \/ Before I even knew you.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nThe song is simple but dramatic, warm and dark. Gary Lightbody\u2019s voice circles around you like satin ribbon being pulled through the air, curving into beautiful, captivating shapes and rippling like water. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome on, come out \/ Come here, come here.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019t call me every night like he used to when he had first moved away. The song became about him \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s distance and there\u2019s silence \/ But your words have never left me \/ They\u2019re the prayer that I say every day.\u201d<\/p>\n
The chorus begs, over and over again: \u201cCome here.\u201d When I sang that plea over the crescendo of stunning instrumentals, I meant it. My voice mixed with Lightbody\u2019s in the mud of grief that is loving someone who is gone but still alive, a grief that is the same whether you\u2019re mourning someone in New York City or on the Gulf Coast. There\u2019s a different kind of ache when you miss someone like they\u2019re dead but they\u2019re not: to know that they\u2019re 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: \u201cCome here, come here.\u201d I sang about New York, all the time.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n\u201cIf you were here beside me \/ Instead of in New York \/ In the arms you said you\u2019d never leave \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Seven summers later, I\u2019m still singing about New York \u2014 about people who aren\u2019t even there but aren\u2019t 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\u2019t New York. It just isn\u2019t here.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll always remember picking up my favorite records from your apartment \/ Kissing you before you left me for New York.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHeaven Is a Bedroom\u201d by TV Girl paints a picture of stubborn, deluded love, just like the kind of love I\u2019ve 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 \u201csalvation\u201d until it ended. Some may see that as an exaggeration, but I don\u2019t. 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\u2019s divinity? How could you pick anything, or anywhere, over love?<\/p>\n
\u201cI was nervous that this was good as I could ever feel \/ And I was right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nI don\u2019t understand it, how people leave so easily. How do you let go of love \u2014 real love, love that alters you to your core and makes you feel like you\u2019ve found the meaning of life, like your particular reason for living has always been to love like this? I\u2019ve 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\u2019t take the cold up here. What\u2019s colder: Michigan winters or no longer knowing your daughter?<\/p>\n
\u201cNew York City\u2019s cold and when you love someone \/ You should hold onto them so tightly \/ \u2018Til you crush them, or they wriggle from your grasp.\u201d<\/p>\n
New York is a glittering, hopeful place, somewhere better than wherever its people came from \u2014 or it\u2019s supposed to be. At the very least, it\u2019s far away and out of reach. Somewhere they can go, but I can\u2019t \u2014 maybe because the rent is too high, or maybe because what they\u2019re really looking for is a place without me in it. And I can\u2019t 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\u2019s not New York, when it\u2019s a leaving that\u2019s uglier, with less color. It\u2019d hurt too much to remember that they didn\u2019t leave me for bustling streets and skyscrapers full of nothing but opportunity; they left for things much smaller than that.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen you can come with me,\u201d says Allie.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo New York?\u201d responds Noah.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n
I had never noticed before now that in \u201cThe Notebook,\u201d Allie (Rachel McAdams, \u201cAre You There God? It\u2019s Me Margaret\u201d) leaves Noah (Ryan Gosling, \u201cThe Fall Guy\u201d) for New York. I only ever knew that she left. The script only says \u201cNew York\u201d three times. It only matters that she went to New York because it was somewhere Noah couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat am I going to do in New York?\u201d says Noah.<\/p>\n
\u201cBe with me?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah \u2026 I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nI originally saw Allie as a girl who was just doing what she had to because of her parents, something she couldn\u2019t 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\u2019m not saying it\u2019s not important to chase your dreams, but to do it without any mind for what you\u2019re leaving behind \u2014 I can\u2019t fathom it. My mental picture of New York has been conflated with images of the real-life places my love has gone. It doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is over,\u201d says Fin. <\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d says Allie. <\/p>\n
\u201cLeave it alone. Let it go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Art often tells the story of the person who left for the city \u2014 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\u2019t help but see everything they\u2019re walking away from. New York is still a hopeful, exciting place, a place I very well might live someday. But before that, it\u2019s something that takes. I\u2019ve sung its name over and over again in jealousy and hurt, \u201cNew York\u201d escaping from my lips when in my head I think Alabama, Michigan, gone away<\/em>. My songs have made me hate that place: New York, the city of endings.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nDaily Arts Writer Audrey Hollenbaugh can be reached at <\/em>aehollen@umich.edu<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n
Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I sat in the backseat of my grandmother\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[287,2479,2124],"class_list":{"0":"post-2248","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-city","9":"tag-endings","10":"tag-york"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2250,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248\/revisions\/2250"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}