Broome St. from my window.
The night isn’t quiet out here. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed that it’s always filled with horns honking or firetrucks racing from the department down the street. Maybe I even only notice now because I’m trying to commit this place to memory. The sounds and sights of it, at least: from the Little Italy sign flashing outside my window to my suitemate’s guests roving in and out of her room.
It’s my last night in the Broome dorm, and I’ve honestly spent more of it goofing off than packing. Chances are this may have been the only time I’ll live in on-campus housing at NYU, which I’m pretty okay with, even though Broome seems like it would be nice to live in during the school year. It’s always amusing to me when on-campus residents post screenshots of the housing system on Facebook from day two or three of assignments when there are one or two or zero rooms left in all of the preferred dorms…and then hundreds of spaces left in Lafayette.
Lafayette dormitory is only about five minutes from here and, as indicated by its popularity, it’s the least-preferred housing. I don’t actually think it’s that different from Broome, but my standards aren’t the same as everyone else’s. For instance, I specifically wanted a place near Chinatown. Because food.
Anyway, J-Bird was at Lafayette last year which meant I visited him there a fair few times, so I’ve been in this area.
I know the stretch going north of here the best, because I often walked straight from Chinatown to spend the night at Laurasaur’s old apartment in the West Village. It’s still kind of strange to me that they’re not in their old homes anymore. That now J-Bird is in Brooklyn and Laurasaur doesn’t have that cramped little space the above the loud wine bar with the scaffolding that was covered in pretty lights.
I’m a big sucker for pretty lights. (Not to be confused with Pretty Lights, which I also like well enough) Today I dragged the usual suspects with me to eat at a restaurant because I’d walked passed it so many nights and noticed that the lights became a beacon on my way home. I used to detour to walk past them, alone on the wet streets when it was so late it was early. Because it’s the little things that make it bearable to live at ground level, and if they happen to be Christmas lights all year ’round: so be it. Especially when they’re so blue they’re almost black—ultraviolet after dark.
Blue lights at Spring and Lafayette
It helped that the restaurant was actually good, I guess. But I didn’t even care what kind of place it was, really. I just liked the idea of becoming one of the people I so often saw sitting there, outdoors and between the planters. I knew I wanted to do this before I left: just like I wanted to walk into the abandoned caverns that Tribeca becomes late at night, or spend an early morning on the benches of the square off Centre Ave before the sun really even wakes up. It was all on this bucket list I didn’t even realize I had until now, even though I may have been adding to it unconsciously since the first week of my internship.
It was good food but a little bit of a letdown, honestly. I’m not sure what I expected to find there: what kind of fulfillment I could possibly get from sitting among the planters in a dress to match. As if I could visit the idea that the blue lights represented in my mind rather than the place itself, maybe. Which would be quite Gatsby of me, except I’m not actually sure why they’re so significant. They’re probably tied to the past. Everything is when you’re being borne ceaselessly into it.
Whatever it is I know I’m leaving it behind. And it’s not like I’m going far, but I tend to get attached to the places where I sleep, which is weird because I thought I’d spent years perfecting the ways of a nomad: living out of a tiny suitcase at the ends of the earth. But things are different when you carry your home in your skin, I guess. Before I’d left my home with my mother, but I’m going to have to find a way to keep my own bones, now.
And perhaps this is the problem with things: that I attach too much importance to places, like this impermanent dormitory for example. Or like the intangible thing that is Summer which is at once an idea and a beast and a time and a place you can walk upon and taste in the air. Like the blue lights that marked my path, telling me that I was almost home.
I’ve been doing some serious looking outside my window tonight, and I’ve noticed something in the distance. To the right of the Chrysler Building there lies a cluster of red lights: cell phone towers in the distance. They remind me of their brethren that I can see from my sister’s home in New Jersey. I’ve visited those ones before, in a time before time that I usually try to forget. They blink slowly out in the Meadowlands and, by train or by highway, are impossible miss. The benign gods of the red lights, I christened them from the passenger seat of a red mustang. The gods who blink benignly, but watch all the petty things we do.
Tomorrow I’m leaving Broome. Those blue lights won’t guide me home and, as such, have more-or-less lost their function as enchanted objects. And that’s what probably affects us most about leaving a place; it’s because we’re losing the idea of a thing even while knowing the object itself remains.
Bardo 