Urban Dirge

Now the city is oversaturated in shame, drowning in it, and everyone looks the same and talks the same and only cares about money and no one is making good art. If I had no shame today I would have told my friend who invited me and twenty-four other people to her apartment for dinner that I think most of her friends are uninteresting, and I don’t want to go. And instead of sneakily asking my mutual friend if he was going, I would have asserted that he would be going and that we would be talking about Blue Velvet over the meal. I also, having just left the theatre, would have laughed as loud and as frequently as I wanted while watching David Lynch’s culturally prescribed magnum opus regardless of whether he meant for his small-town-love-story-film-noir-porno to ellicit such a chuckle. 

It’s Saturday night, and I watch girls dressed to the nines walk past as I wander through the village streets. Why do I have such an aversion to well-dressed young people? Why do I always characterize them as “trying too hard?” Am I jealous that they get to feel like they own this city when I’ve been here twenty-one years and hardly feel entitled to sit on the stoop of the apartment building in which I live? I carry this with me everywhere and it’s ruining my time. In high school my peers and I ran this town. We frequented Greenwich Village, often hitting up the Thai restaurant on West 4th where we never feared being carded, followed by weekend gossip sessions next to the fountains in the NYU housing plaza, playing card games at the Gay street Joe Coffee, and late night dancing to the drums in Washington Square Park. Now I’m twenty-one and living in a post(?) COVID NYC where there is a hyper-awareness of who is in what space and whether or not they belong there. People have decided to move here and bring with them their suburban inhibitions and regulation. Don’t these people understand we are running a free city? Now everything is done in the name of  “safety.” It’s no longer 3 am dancing until you sweat – an act of rebellion through the Columbus Day weekend chill. The park is gated and surveilled past midnight. The joy of our card games is too loud for the business exec at the table next to us to hear his own emptiness. Now we’re “obnoxious.” The garden is no longer a reliable space to share secrets with the influencers and their cameras stepping in front of you at every corner. 

Sometimes I think maybe this is just growing up. Maybe the city has always been this way, I’ve just been too close to the ground to see it. But my mother too thinks it has changed, as do many people who have been here for a long time. Some people are optimistic, insistent even, that things will and have to return to what they once were, but I’m already planning my escape.