A couple of months ago, I asked my friend Dylan if he wanted to meet at New York Burger Co. He immediately lit up at the suggestion. It was a staple of our adolescence and we hadn’t been there since high school.
Once we sat down with our food, Dylan and I took turns taste-testing the fries. Too salty and somewhat hard to chew — not exactly how we remembered them, which was a little disappointing.
Growing up, The Burger Place, our affectionate nickname for the restaurant, was where we shared milkshakes and math notes, celebrated the opening night of our high school’s production of “Into the Woods” and exchanged gifts for our annual Secret Santa. My friends and I knew the manager so well he’d give us free soda with our meals. To me, it felt like a second home.
So, going back to The Burger Place was supposed to feel familiar and comforting. I wanted the fries to taste the same. But they didn’t.
Being from New York City is an important part of my identity, and as a result, something I’m incessantly teased about by my non-New York friends. Driving into Manhattan from the airport is overwhelmingly nostalgic. All I think is, “I’m finally home.”
However, every time I return, I’m confronted with a harsh reality: New York City waits for no one.
The dry cleaners next to my apartment building closed. It’s a luxury barbershop now. I resent the owners. I want the dry cleaners back. The childish, unreasonable, selfish part of me wishes they had consulted me first. I would have made it very clear that the layout of the building was not suited for a barbershop, and then I would have begged the cleaners to stay open.
I’ve found the longer I’m away, the more narrow my definition of “New Yorker” becomes. As a kid, I didn’t have a concept of “New Yorker” at all. My world didn’t go beyond the Hudson River, so as far as I was concerned, everyone I met was a New Yorker. After all, they lived here, didn’t they?
Now that I’m in college, I’m much more protective of the label. I want it to be mine and mine alone.
When walking through Chelsea with my childhood friends, we play I Spy with the college kids. They’re all the same in our heads: Sheltered. Suburban. Trying to make it in the Big Apple. Will never be able to keep up. Not like us.
We ready ourselves and our “New Yorkness” for when they pass us. Our prepared dialogue:
“Remember how we hung out here every day after school?”
“I can’t believe this place is closed! It was my favorite store growing up!”
“The fries used to be different back in high school.”
“I can’t wait to move back here after college. I miss being home so much.”
“You know what? When I was little, I never noticed how many college kids live here.”
We want them to feel as if they don’t belong the same way we want to affirm to any locals that we, in fact, are the epitome of a “New Yorker.”
But in my head, I’m facing more difficult questions. How well can I keep up with my city if I live so far away? What if these college students are more “New York” than me? Why wouldn’t they be? They live there, and I don’t.
So, I continue to narrow my definition of “New Yorker” to feel slightly better about myself.
“Only real New Yorkers remember the fries tasting different.”
It’s a unique property of growing up in such a dynamic city. In suburbia, your home outlives you. The same roads, houses and stores will likely remain 10, 20 years down the line. I hear stories of people revisiting their childhood homes with all the walls intact.
I have to accept that 10, 20 years down the line, my childhood home might be the foundation for a Korean BBQ. I’d mourn the loss over grilled pork belly.
Accepting that parts of my childhood quite literally disappear off the map isn’t easy. What makes it harder is how sudden the change is. I came home expecting the fries to taste the same.
New York City gives me no time to grieve. The Dunkin’ closes; a new cafe opens. My favorite restaurant stops serving calamari; I have new next-door neighbors. New York City does all of this without me.
It snowed in Boston last week. A pastry chef’s dream. Powdered sugar on bristled bodies. It reminded me of Central Park in the winter, but only that one particular winter when school was canceled for a snow day. The snow was thick and tall — we could barely bend our knees — but Dylan and I marched across the Upper West Side to a spot halfway between 89th Street and the projects off of Morningside.
We had to film a short movie for our film class, and we were excited to have a beautiful winter backdrop as an upper hand. No New York teenager could be so stupid as to wake up early on the one snow day of the year to do something for Ms. Yergen’s class. No one but us.
We’d sacrifice our free day, but — at the very least — we’d make the prettiest-looking movie, and that was what mattered. After all, Dylan and I always had this shared, unspoken yearning for perfection. It manifested itself in different ways. I tried to be perfect. He perfected not trying. We balanced each other well.
Five hours later, the camera took its last breath and because we were hilariously underdressed — though, it wasn’t hilarious to us at the time — our limbs were numb. The thought of my toes having completely frozen over made me cry our entire journey out of the park. My plastic calf-high rain boots squeaked as we walked to the slushed streets where we caught a cab headed north.
We complained to each other the entire way up to his apartment — the snow, the shoes, the camera, the things we could have spent the day doing instead.
I looked for the footage of the movie we filmed and I couldn’t find it. Another childhood memory of mine swallowed up by New York City.
I resent myself for losing the footage, for not appreciating that moment more, for whining as much as I did. But in a city of more than 8 million people, I can’t expect time to freeze for me. The most “New York” thing I could do is accept it and move on.
In the back window, trailing behind us as we whined, were the park’s sugar-sprinkled branches waving, calling us over with a light breeze and begging for our return.
