New York
I can’t hide my luggage. I push it further under the bed, but a corner still peeks out, inviting theoretical roommates to grab and steal and disappear. I handed over my laptop to the twitchy teenager at the front desk, praying to Jesus she took it to locker two and didn’t pass it off to her drug dealer for a few extra grams.
I take a deep breath. The dingy bed is covered in hospital-white sheets. Maybe they’re trying to lull me into a false sense of security so I’m not alarmed when two greasy Australian ravers interrupt my sleep at 3 a.m. with the aftershocks of their night out, the smell of late-night cigarettes snuffing out the aroma of Fresh Air on my few still-unworn clothes. Or maybe the strangers will be quiet, bookish: if I imagine the worst, I am rarely disappointed.
At 11:41 p.m. in the city that never sleeps, I’m curled in an off-white blanket I begged from the hostel night-hours manager, and I’m alone. The other travelers have yet to return from the bars and concerts and bright lights. I’m alone. Ear-numbing tribal beats trickle through my third-floor walls, pulsating from the lobby dance club I can’t enter because my ID says 1988. I’m alone. I’m alone, overcome with the inane need to validate at least three stereotypes of Midwesterners in my two-day stay: confused, overwhelmed, and – oh yeah – small girl, traveling alone.
Five minutes later, I’ve grabbed my laptop, shoved it into my dirty red messenger bag and am on the hunt for a Starbucks, a 24-hour Internet café or any open store I can briefly occupy. I’m not picky. The mid-July temperature pulls drops from my skin as heat rises from the manholes and the sidewalks into my sweaty shoes. It trickles from my hairline and covers my back, the urgency to find shelter increasing as drops inch towards my belt.
A rattling jingle across the street announces the arrival of the one who will become my nemesis over the next ten blocks: a crinkly old Asian man nudging a shopping cart down the narrow street, carrying a sign: “Please help. I am homeless.” The wheels catch on the shoulder, falling to the ground with an unnerving crunch. I adjust my bag and quicken my pace.
I choose a lifeline – dial a friend, a friend at whose house I awoke that morning in the relative safety of New Jersey. Three rings and an “I’m asleep” and I’m back in the battle. I barrel through the streets, blocking out the clatter of the shopping cart behind me. He has crossed the street. I can’t put on my headphone for fear of sneak attacks.
I begin to prepare battle plans as I approach 32nd and 6th. If he comes from my left, I have my car keys in hand. From my right: solar plexus, instep, nose, and groin. My knuckles are popped and primed and my shoes are tight. I’m ready to run.
From behind me, I hear coins clinking against the pavement. I find the old man stooped over, sweeping up the day’s change from the spilled cup in his cart. For a second I debate helping, but I recoil: it’s only a trick to bring me closer, so close he can slip his hands around my neck, his fingers tightening on my quickening pulse.
I make a right onto Broadway and the brilliant lights of Time Square down the street are an anesthetic, forcing my doubts down my windpipe, letting them rumble in my stomach briefly before floating into nothing. Bright lights shine in the big city, overflowing with strange human-like animals ravenous for more. I had been here before without letting the swelling darkness and the sticky streets clench my throat and twist it into a balloon animal. But I’d never been here alone.
The wrinkled old man stumbled across the street, clutching a brown paper bag in his shopping cart and curling into a muddy corner. There was no one else for me to cling to; alone in Times Square is different than being alone in a dusty hostel room. The fusion of separate but equal people bordered on romantic – a queasy, crowded, drunken romanticism.
The last two streets seemed an endless stretching wasteland, as the lights of Times Square never moved closer and the stores I walked by were already closed, forcing my laptop bag to pinch my shoulder in violent protest. At 42nd Street, I was caught in an eddy and sucked into the crowd, pushed from point to point with little choice or decision of my own.
I’ve never been scared of crowds or large spaces or lights or happiness, but separation from human contact made me twitch and nervous, paranoid that I still embodied every miserable misconception I hoped to prove wrong: Kansas girl visits the big city, goes crazy.
I stumbled into the Starbucks on a friendly shove from a drunken girl sprinting towards 47th Street. The store was silent, save the brief, uncomfortable exchange between the barista and me. I settle into a rusty red seat, letting the air conditioner make me a blanket of cool air. Outside the revelers put on a performance for me, tripping, falling, shouting, laughing; I was their overwhelmed audience. A single-pane plate of glass separated me from the whirlpool, and for all the 1.6 million outside, I couldn’t call a single one “friend.”
No stranger to bustle and traffic and fifty-story buildings, I still felt lost as the barista handed me my low-fat milk latte before burying her head in a Gabriel García Marquez novel – the same waiting to be read on my nightstand. In my glass Starbucks cage, it was less about the stereotypes that made up my invisible baggage but about who wasn’t there.
The bell on the door tinkled the arrival of the stench of liquor, weed and cigarettes. The rank odor filled the room on the shoulders of four white-collar Midtown twenty-somethings who teetered towards the table next to me. The girl looked at me and at my laptop. “Why aren’t you at a club?”
I could do that, but I’d rather not do it alone. I closed my screen, threw the bag around my waist and slipped out the door, drifting mindlessly into the communal trance. I called a cab for the ride to my hostel to avoid the paranoia of dark streets. Under my bed I found my suitcase, intact, and above my bed I found a British woman, a fellow first-time solo traveler. Her name was Lucy, and we both slept peacefully.
