Here’s the thing about living in a city of eight million people: you never get away from them.
I can only speak for the South, since that’s the only other place I’ve lived (besides a brief stint in Boca Raton, but as we all know: FLORIDA DOES NOT COUNT AS THE SOUTH. Especially South Florida.) The way of life I’m used to is walking from house to car, car to work, car to grocery store, car to church, etc. When you do interact with other people, you can always make a quick getaway if necessary. Jump in said car, run across a field, slam a door behind you–plus, there is plenty of space available to put distance between yourself and other people when you just want to be alone. In New York, you walk up a few flights of stairs to your shoebox apartment and try to not hear your neighbor’s pulsating fiesta music next door when you want some “me” time–good luck. Outside the city, a person has time to relax and regroup between interactions with others. Did someone make you mad? (A post office employee, perhaps?) Did someone say the wrong thing? Was someone (gasp) RUDE? Then ride in your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned home, where you can sit at your picture window as you sip a glass of iced tea and GET OVER IT. Here, it’s a little different. You bang into people all day, and there’s really no escaping it. What it does, though, is keep things real. There’s no time or space to be fake. Human interaction is reduced to the blatant, cold, hard truth. You find out what people are like when they are stripped of all pretense. It can be both the scariest and most refreshing thing you ever experience.
The deal is, we are all such broken people. No matter how well we clean up for company, there are cracks beneath our surface veneer that we want no one to see. None of us has escaped without wounds from life thus far. Through our own mistakes and the mistakes of others, we are banged, bruised, and scarred. We deal with each other out of our own stories, out of our own wounds. Which means we deal with each other so imperfectly. We wound each other further. Our rough, broken edges collide with another’s rough, broken edges and though we both try to pretend that we’re doing OK, we’re just fine, thank you–we’re not. We’re raw. People here are a little more tired of hiding that. Their rawness lies closer to the surface. There’s an element of truth to that interaction that is unnerving and liberating.
Someone was asking me the other day if my relationships in the city were not as deep as my other relationships due to the fast pace and the transitory nature of the population here. I had to think for about two seconds before I realized why that wasn’t at all the case. Relationships in the city share an almost inexplicable bond. There is certainly the sense of not having much time, but that serves to make people take seriously what time they do have. We are like war buddies who navigate this insane place together. Plus, there is the added dimension of each person’s reason for being here: most of us are searching for something we couldn’t seem to find anywhere else. That makes us allies. There is a layer of that carefully prepared veneer that just doesn’t hold up in the city–it crumbles soon after you get here. Fake doesn’t last long when you keep crashing into people. And that’s when you realize something important…
Maybe if people quit pretending they were perfect, they would actually know each other.