I’m sitting on my floor mattress in my first apartment in New York City. My hair is wet, Hispanic music is wafting through the window, and I’m wearing the ratty, old “I <3 NY” shirt that I bought on one of the Broadway adventures with my mom in high school.
If you had told 14 year old me that this is where I would be when I was 21, that little annoying teenager would have jumped around like a hyperactive Chihuahua on crack. Now it’s surreal.
New York was the city I wanted to move to because it had pretty lights and musicals and was the first city I went to that was bigger than Boston. Now I’ve been to Los Angeles, San Diego, Berlin, Prague, Rome, Venice, Dublin, Cardiff, and Edinburgh. Now I’ve lived in London. London has my heart unconditionally, and being here makes me realize even more how much I miss it. London is...cleaner. More comfortable. Full of British men who are too awkward and self-conscious to make eye-contact, let alone start cat-calling (seriously, male populace of NYC: come up with a more original nickname for me than “Red.” It's not even my real color).
That’s not to say I’m not happy to be here. When I came down for my interview over a month ago, I couldn’t help but feel a little rekindle of my old teenage Broadway dreams as I walked through Time Square.
And I can check this off my list: live in a crappy apartment in New York. I’m fairly certain I saw my first squashed cockroach on the stairs today. I live with two students who go to Columbia and are majoring in areas so intellectual that I didn’t even understand the titles. They’re also both male and from India. The kitchen looks like the behind-the-scenes of an ethnic restaurant that failed the health exam. The elevator is straight out of a horror movie.
The sane part of me knows that these things should bother me. But I can’t stop smiling and laughing. It’s like I’m already at that point in the future when I can look back on this and laugh. In a completely ridiculous, slightly masochistic sense, it feels amazing to be living somewhere that I know would make my sister cringe. I had a laughing fit in the shower after the water turned from scalding to ice that was so strong that I had to lean against the wall, naked and shaking with laughter. You know, leaning against the wall naked was probably not the best choice in retrospect...
I’m a writer. I can hardly afford food and I moved to NYC for the summer. I’m an intern at a film and television studio. I’m here and I’m doing this.
You know, if I can’t be successful and famous (and if I can’t be Jennifer Lawrence) then this is exactly where I want to be.
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