A supercut of memories,
feelings,
and unverbalized realizations,
acquired amidst the streets of New York City.


Setting foot in a new place became a somber act, once I realized that all my desires are tethered to the place I have just left behind. As if there is a rope attached to my back — a realization of my loss and longing that haunts my every movement. With time, it has grown deeper under my skin,  until its thin, thread-like fingers reached my spine. Bloodstream was an unfamiliar environment for the fibers, but the curse of evolution allowed them to transform and thrive within my nagging pain. Maybe this was the way generational traumas emerge and persist through decades, accumulating inside veins and arteries like calcium deposits within the water pipes.


We wonder why our parents don’t realize it, but how is one supposed to handle it? The body becomes merely a house for the lovemaking between bone and an adverse agent. Could almost label it as ‘enemies to lovers’, simply a natural occurrence.


I don’t think I registered the moment that this pulling sensation appeared. Maybe I could only feel it after the Emergency Mode of traveling was washed away with hot water in the shared shower, right across my new (temporary) room.


The conflicting thing was, I did feel excited to live in New York. I was looking forward to figuring things out, taking time to learn the coexistence with silence. I really think I did.


NYC has always felt like a distant vision most of the world has pieced together from TV shows and rumors. A vision that only a select few know the true magic of. That almost wasn’t a lie, if not for the eyes of the “select few” that I had observed every 50-minute-long train ride, day after day. Their tense postures, overtime sighs, mingled voices over the phone. Hands, rough and dirty, glistening and manicured — all sorts of hands, really — holding onto the same porches, polished with hundreds and hundreds of hands just like these.


I tried to see the magic of NYC through its gray, eye-stinging segregation. I found traces of this magic inside the love stories about the city, told by the people it had saved, hidden between the lines of museum title cards, scattered across the hands-holding-and-lips-touching bits of humanity. Desiring to believe in its existence, I almost felt like allowing myself to see its true face was an act of betrayal to the stunning image. An indictment I wasn’t ready to bring against the status-quo; an undermining of a fact I didn't feel qualified to propose.







On one of the first Saturdays I found myself pacing around Manhattan in a thirty-three-degree heat. How far will people go for the sake of art? At the very least: 34 000 steps woven around East Harlem’s streets and stairs. It was an Open Doors initiative, found on a sketchy website (when wasn’t it?), made to bring the public attention into studios of independent artists.


As my legs circled for approximately eight hours around East Harlem’s streets and stairs, the back-ridden rope began to tie into knots. Like an unwanted neighbor who is making noise past midnight, I felt the thuds of the clumps of thickening rope falling behind me. No matter how strong the rope was, my so-thought ‘rational’ intentions kept convincing me to stay in the new place. I made myself believe that I could always come back home, but that needed to wait.


So there I was, pacing around East Harlem. God bless those people who have created websites with local events, and god bless those who have told me about them. Before living in the US I would never assume that somebody else’s money and management would aid me so faithfully with a meal, content to keep my head busy, and most importantly— companionship to my loneliness.


That morning someone, whose name or voice I can’t recall, was educating me on Harlem’s history through the close proximity of my earphones. You shouldn’t always trust that first podcast recommendation, but that day seemed to be a lucky day. Dutch colonial settlement, two streets wide, grew into one of its brightest periods over the years. The Harlem Renaissance sounds like something important, because it is. But I was just starting to understand this place I was suddenly engulfed by.


One of the first things I took notice of was the big smile of a woman inside a small white-walled space, covered with her artwork. She was laughing with her friends standing around a table, which diligently kept together everything that was put on it.


Her name was Mekia, and two things from her that I took most deeply into my life were the following:

1. “It’s not going to make sense at the start” - written in rough black letters on an unevenly cut out square of paper, taped to the wall.
2. That nonchalant tone, as she told me about the series of paintings she made about her best friend, who drowned as a child. Faceless series. She said she couldn’t remember her face anymore.

The first one healed me a while, and the second one killed me a while. Those always go together.






I had never heard about Juneteenth before I questioned why there were only 4 workdays that week. It wasn’t unexpected, more so, it would have been worse to learn that such a date wasn’t even honored enough to let people celebrate it without an additional burden of capitalism to bear.


That day I found a pile of old, yellow-paged books scattered on the road crossing Central Park. For some reason, I want to think that such a murder would have never happened back home. I know I am idealizing. As I picked them up and moved away from the careless wheels carrying even more careless drivers, I knew that this would definitely not happen back home. At least because it wouldn’t be people with borderless privilege destroying the resources that many in their city don’t even possess.


To honor Juneteenth, there was a free concert in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. What a perfect excuse that was to roam around the touristy streets and gaze at the mighty East river. I saw too many happy friend groups laughing at each other as they shared picnic blankets, food, and sing-alongs, that it made my chest clutch. I almost regretted my eagerness to experience the community culture around that date.


Almost, because I didn’t.


There was a grey-haired gentleman who sat down next to me as the concert was about to start. We both held books in our hands. Among quite a number of empty chairs, as a foreign-looking girl who definitely seemed guilty to even be here, his seating choice was all the support I needed. We ended up talking almost the entire time of the concert. I took notes of the important things:

He said

“The thing about life is that you got to enjoy the moment. Because you can never be sure about tomorrow. You shall know that you are right here right now, and then you can reminisce about it. Think back to what it was like. This is what life is about”.


If my grandfather had raised himself to be a liberal man, able to take things into perspective, this is how I imagined it would feel to be talking to him. I could feel it through the air: the warmth of the gentleman’s energy, experience and years, as they were weighting on his back.


We had been watching people dance and sing along to all sorts of African beats for a couple of hours.


His response to my

“You know, for some reason, it makes me feel so liberated to watch other people enjoy their culture”

Was

“Yes, because it’s peaceful. Genuine. That’s what people should be living like. Worldwide. Every day, not just one day a year”

And that hit.






I had gone to another open studio in Harlem.


The painter’s name was Julio Valdez. I have never seen the purity of the ocean on paper before. Never felt the water hold me so dearly from a meter-long distance of its portrait to my body.


To my question of whether he had been painting water for a long time, or if he started recently, he didn’t give a concrete response. I don’t think he had one, But he said:


“Nature is ever present, it’s something that will be there all the time”


Now if that doesn’t make you question a glimpse-long human existence, I don’t know what will. We talked for an hour and he offered me cold water. It felt like my curious eyes and pacing mind felt some solace in that bright space, breathing in the complexity of human existence and breathing out art.


I inquired about his exhibitions and works. He said that he likes it better when people “see it where it starts”—in the studio.

“I like to welcome people in my space” — i wonder how many restless night he’s spent here, with wet paint on his hands and clothes — “Many galleries view art as business and don’t even look at you” — and i wonder how many times he got turned away and still came back to his colors, and brushes covered in a crust of dry paint, and solitude among the piles of materials, — all for the sake of covering the skin of canvas with feelings.





It was a political art exhibition, and those always feel like home. They strike me straight into the ribs and out through the back. Every single slogan, or a twisted face—painted, photographed, torn out from its context just to signify something to those who would never see it come alive—

It was all about Puerto Rico. I looked at the flags, posters, and clips from movies. However, I could not see any title cards, contextual explanations;

A so-called ‘territory’ of the United States. Without the status of a sovereign state. Sounded familiar.

There was a man sitting at a table in a hallway. I asked if he was one of the artists that contributed to it. He told me it was all his own work. He told me how he dropped out of college after first year and worked on a movie set at eighteen. Eight to ten hour days, he worked for free, just for food and experience.

We talked about art, and he said “Art doesn’t just change the world, it changes the people”. Hopefully, if you’re a good artist, however you define that, your art might bring those people to do things—think, eat, speak, create, [...]—differently.

I noted down at least fifteen book and movie recommendations that he spoke of. “Capitalism is a paradigm. There is no way out if there’s a status quo to fall back into when things get difficult - the temptation is too high. When there’s nothing to fall back on you have to push forward. Now, you tell me how do we deal with capitalism not needing democracy?”

&

“The only reason we don’t provide for everyone is because someone will not be making money off of it. This model lets many bad people make objectively bad decisions, and still get away with it.”

&

“If people feel the impact of your ideas—people would defend you and your ideas”

&

“if i was young i’d be thinking: this (present) is my time, this is the greatest time”

When I was about to leave, he said “Let me give you a poster! You’re a student, you cannot afford 15$”. In my tiny room in an old house in the Bronx, that poster became a glimpse of hope—and love—to the future. Like the name of his exhibition, it read “The Art of Resistance”.




New York City is a refuge for the abandoned. Yellow-paged paperbacks on the benches along Central Park West. Cigarette butts scattered like the traces of anxious pacing across pavement creaks. Bent and twisted beer cans, left to huddle in a corner of an empty sidewalk. Careless evenings of childhood, swept away with the dust over high wooden shelves, traded for a couple dollar bills per a pack of M&M’s.


It never stops. It swallows you whole, until it feels like a losing race most of the time, regardless of the outcomes. You leave, you stay, you live, you die, you laugh, you make memories — it has meaning for a while, but not for too long. At some point, it’s simply over. The world goes on with its systems, hopes and hopelessness, saints and villains. We can spend years figuring it out, and still be left with nothing. Or, be left with something we cannot possibly take with us, but we know it’s a legacy that will outlive a memory of our existence.


Now, the shelters of NYC, that are its streets, have also acquired my fallen words, stuck beneath the roots of grass in Central Park. The realizations I had underlined with my unsharpened pencil inside the library books, paired with the questions I had dog eared. My messy, half-inaudible, twisted, and fainting dreams of home, left beneath the many pillows I had laid my head on those nights. And the rope ripped out of my back, too, abandoned somewhere along Lexington Avenue.