The Lonely City

During the day, New York is a hub of aspirations and purpose and buzzing personality. There is an excitement that accompanies the freedom of having so many possibilities, and on every street corner – whether in the ripped jeans or immaculate hair in the crowd waiting to cross the road, or in the carefully planned design of the corner cafe – you find self-expression.

Yet at night, the people hunch their shoulders into their own worlds and it becomes an artificially lit, faceless loneliness. New York City is vast – the kind of vastness that you tumble into excitedly and then realise that you never stopped falling. It’s the kind of place you want to explore on your own for a day (wielding your independence and revelling in empowerment) but find your way back to a warm home with people you love at the end.

New York is a writhing intersection of the familiar and unfamiliar, of a universal humanity and a jarring disconnect.

And the people. I swear, every character trait coded into the human genome is breathing in this city. I’ve never been so curious about the stories that led people to the moment that I collided with them. The old woman mumbling to herself in French as her husband stares at her across a small cafe table; the drunk, unshaven man giving us the Lord’s blessing over and over at 3am; the endless stream of couples sharing glances in the subway; what are their lives like? What do they think as they get up in the morning and pull on their clothes?

Serendipitously, scrolling through my newsfeed as I waited for the bus to start moving, I came across a literary expression of all the undertones I couldn’t put a name on, in Olivia Laing’s novel, ‘The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone’. Laing moved to New York after a debilitating break up, and struggled continuously with the loneliness of what she called “that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass”. In one quote, she muses,

“Imagine standing by a window at night, on the sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building. The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can’t reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.

You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour of loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.”

My spontaneous two-day trip to New York was absolutely inspiring and exciting and motivating and empowering, and it stirred up a lot of thoughts around self discovery. But as I settled into the bus for the ride home (back to my slightly-too-high bed and the concrete mass I know my way around), I felt an overwhelming sense of relief to be leaving.