New York, I Love You
By: Ben Goodwin
Tags: Love Letters, New York City, Covid 19, Grief, Essay

New York, I love you, but I hate to see you this way.

They say we can survive anything, but some days I’m not so sure. Sometimes I wonder if our famed toughness is just a soft cover to our splayed open hearts. Sometimes I wonder if underneath it all, we’re just as fragile as the MTA.

But here we are anyway, New York, and we’ll try to be strong if you promise to help.

New York, I can see your scars already.

We knew it would happen, but I thought we had more time.

All around us we’ve seen the bandages of closed stores, shuttered restaurants, empty city buses, and always the sirens ringing out their angry demands day and night. We’ve watched things close day after day, with no guess as to their return.

We’re missing thirty-two thousand souls, and we don’t know where to begin.

New York, it’s been five months, and I can see you yawning. Your streets are growing busy once more and the parks are full. People sit on the street, drinking cocktails and eating food, and you’re moving beneath us.

But those bandages are coming off slowly, and what’s underneath is uncertain.

The other day we got a call saying our favorite bar is closing for good. We planned to get married there, to celebrate in summer and to feel free and alive. We cried when we heard even as we told ourselves that we should have known.

With each new tear we see something new. Or maybe just a lack of something old.

With more places shuttered each day, we see the holes they’ve left on the landscape.

Scrolling through my old photos of nights out with friends feels like looking at a mausoleum. It’s a boneyard of places I’ll never go again––there are already too many to eulogize.

New York, you’re holy. We’ve anointed you with a million tears but we’re not sure how many we have left.

Grief can take a long time to settle in, especially when the dying isn’t quick. And we’ve had month after month of it without any understanding as to when it might end or if it’s going to get worse again. We’ve had month after month of holding it in until we burst.

We try to rebuild our hearts, but how many times can they break?

We like to think that everything is a learning opportunity, and our experiences give us gifts even if we don’t recognize them at the time. But the truth is, we grieve out of necessity whether we learn something or not, and it’s not our job to find the lesson.

Our only job is to let go and feel it, even when the feeling is too much. It’s our job to let our bodies in on the task, and to allow our bones and muscles to release it along with our hearts and minds.

New York, we’re grieving but we don’t know how.

We’ll mark this time with shared memories in the form of stories for years to come. But none of it will come close to taking this shared trauma and letting it be as it must. None of those stories will capture the millions of lives experiencing anger, grief, fear, and hope in a million different ways.

New York, I love you, but you have to pull your own weight in this relationship.

You have to give us moments of overwhelming kindness and generosity in the midst of everything else, and you have to open our eyes to the wonder we once felt when we first saw your gleaming towers.

You have to help us see bones when we’ve been doing nothing but eating flesh, and you have to remind us that we don’t live in you, but we are you.

New York, we’ll hold you and let the scars heal if you do the same for us. We’ll sit in your parks, we’ll laugh on your stoops, we’ll party on your rooftops, and we’ll hope when it’s hopeless.

New York, we’re strong, but, my god, are we tired.

Let’s promise to breathe and slow down and see if we can live. Maybe, if we rest enough, we’ll have the strength to open the window and see you again.

Maybe, if we unclench our fists, we can remember that you’re still here.