Leaving Home Isn’t Solely About Real Estate

A new place equals new beginnings, and leaving behind decades of history can be equally liberating as it is saddening.

I always had this distinct feeling that I was at the edge of the earth whenever I was in the reaches of far eastern Queens.

Of course, this sounds ridiculous if you look at a map.

The precise blip of land where New York City’s eastern boundary ends and Nassau County begins is barely palpable, just like how you’ll waltz into Yonkers quickly enough if you head due north on Broadway in The Bronx.

But you eventually spot subtle changes with Westchester County’s invisible border, despite that same assortment of low-rise pre-war apartment buildings and houses narrower than pencils jammed together: homes gradually increase in girth like taper candles. They slightly sprawl amid streets that slowly widen. Signage looks different. The air feels different. You know you’re still in a city, but it’s not the same. You’re past the northern border of a frequently-overlooked borough of a city many would consider the capital of the entire world.

Whereas that gooch between Queens and Long Island bears similar traits yet oh so many deviations that make it tough to discern where the city ends and suburbia begins.

Where even though you’ve got about 100 miles to go before you wind up in the Atlantic Ocean, something about this particular boundary makes me feel like I’m clinging to the edge of this slippery precipice, my fingers digging into this icy cliff face like I’m about to cascade to my demise and wash up on the cold, grassy beaches of south Brooklyn if I’m lucky.

This persistent feeling at the Queens-Nassau border that I’ve felt all my life makes sense yet it doesn’t.

At least in that tiny liminal space between The Bronx and Yonkers, you’ve got the open vastness of the Taconic Parkway, it’s easy to straight shot into the city, and Jersey’s a hop and skip over the Hudson. Whereas when you’ve reached the end of almost every line in the subway system to the east, it’s a long way back.

If you don’t want to be trapped on Long Island or even this state, your only way out is getting on an aircraft. Since even the Long Island Expressway feels cramped and as compact as it appears on a map.

Then that anxiety gives way to marveling at the ability to go literally almost anywhere in the whole world.

That even after all this time, people still clamor to be in my homeland.

I once easily hopped to and from this looming edifice formerly dubbed Idlewild from my crapshack in The Bronx: ripe with self-determination to see the world and take advantage of the extreme level of autonomy I enjoyed once I gave the finger to traditional employment then never looked back.

This won’t be my last time here. In fact, I plan on being back in a few months to visit my family then fly to Ireland thanks to all the miles I accrued throughout the first few COVID waves (providing that we don’t have to learn more of the Greek alphabet and I subsequently need to cancel).

But today is my last day in JFK where it serves as my home airport.

It’s ceremonial. Like all the grief I leave behind, it is a long process.

After all, Terminals 4 and 5 became my second home from 2016–2019. I was there so often, that I was on a first-name basis with half the cashiers at the Cibo canteen near all the JetBlue departures until the pandemic whirred up their staffing like the row of blenders at the Jamba Juice adjacent to the western gates.

For years, I’d feel this resting in my bones whenever Manhattan’s telltale shape came into view from the airplane, lamenting that I could see Pelham Bay Park and Co-Op City from this bird’s eye view but it would be such a ridiculous schlep back.

Still, it meant I was home from whatever sojourn I’d been on.

These sojourns became more frequent once I decided to truly go all the way on my digitally-enabled freedom of movement that entrepreneurship granted, which no “good” job could possibly match. That life was too short not to get out in the world as much as I could.

But over time, I hadn’t noticed that the things that made my city my home, not just a place to live, began to gradually fade away.

What separates a home from where you shower, sleep, and stow your shit?

Well, what it says on your birth certificate doesn’t necessarily mean anything relative to who you are.

You can have a different gender than the one you were assigned at birth. Or lack a grounding and loving relationship with the people listed as your parents.

Same goes for the place named on that certificate: you can have zero attachment to it, or even a heart full of hate. It could be a place where you spent significant chunks of your upbringing, but never felt any love and belonging.

After a long and painful exile, I returned to the city my family called home for generations the second I turned 18. I was happy to be home and making it on my own, even if certain chapters were tenuous.

While I wanted to travel and see the world, and knew that I didn’t want to be bound by schools and employers, full-time digital nomad life where you live out of a suitcase didn’t appeal to me. I loved being on the road for weeks or even a month or two at a time, but also liked constantly returning to my homebase that happened to be a world hub where I had so much history. I had my own apartment, a thriving community in the punk and the indie game developer scenes, and was now a jet-setter who paid a condo association instead of a landlord: what wasn’t to love?

Well, that’s how it looked in magazine-speak.

Because eventually, all I had left in the homeland was my crappy little condo and being just an hour from my dad as the city became infested with chains and empty buildings. Not for nothing, cheap and stable housing isn’t anything to snub in this economy and it’s nice to be close to the only family you got left.

Then one day under lockdown, I just broke.

I thought of what life was like before the pandemic, and what it would mean when vaccines rolled out and we’d be able to see loved ones and gather in groups again. And I said I didn’t want to live like this anymore: where I’m primarily in touch with friends through Twitter, and don’t have any plans unless I’m on the road or it’s an industry event. I can enjoy my own company, but there’s a limit!

While the loneliness was a major deciding factor, so was the realization I was utterly depressed staying where I was: surrounded by these monuments to chapters of my life that had long since ended.

And someone needs to tell you since the real estate industry won’t: just because you pay a bank and/or condo board instead of a landlord doesn’t mean you’ll actually put down roots. I bought yet my entire life and community faded away.

I don’t regret it from a financial standpoint. But a deed won’t bring my dead family, friends, scenes, and ways of life back.

The happiest time of my adult life was when I spent the entire month of September 2017 going up and down the west coast. First I just chalked it up to all the games conferences and stage time, friends specifically making time to see me while I was in town, and the stark climate and cultural differences between the east and west coasts that only amp up to 11 when you’re living out of hotels and treated as an important professional whose value is in being temporary.

But it took two years to realize I accidentally built a life out there despite owning a home and almost 130 years of history back in New York.

It took three years and a pandemic to realize I’d been grieving all my life, and that I had a better chance for happiness in going west.

It took FOUR years to realize that in California, I’m defined by who I am today and what I built. New York stored all these past versions of myself dating back to the Reagan administration. All the trauma, insecurities, grieving, and seeking different forms of love just to get anemic responses or nothing at all.

Where despite starting my own business here, I was mostly defined by my roles in deference to others: daughter. Granddaughter. Student. Employee. Bandmate of a band that wasn’t really mine. Scenester. Co-owner, then sole owner. “Girlfriend but not formally called the girlfriend”.

I could sell my apartment and go to a nicer rental in Brooklyn, where I’ll have a better quality of life and be nearer to the remaining music and alt culture outposts there, plus the seat of the city’s game development hub. It’s tempting, I definitely thought about it.

But aside from my own familial history in the borough that makes me too depressed to go to certain parts, I have too much context for what Brooklyn was like before it was utterly razed and gentrified to fuck. Oh, you also like hometown heroes Biohazard and Type O Negative? Their childhood homes are worth somewhere in the upwards of $1,000,000 now. Far from the tales of backstreet brawls in Urban Discipline and Peter Steele’s elegiac odes to rotting Flatbush porches.

I have great memories of passing out on those cold, grassy beaches after seeing punk and metal bands at Peggy O’Neills, after our tiny group of Bronx punks made that long schlep there by subway.

I’m glad I have those memories. But I need to move on to something totally new.

I had to say my goodbyes once I knew things were definite.

I have too much context for these streets. I will not heal or move on from my grief and trauma if I stay. I can’t put my arms around memories, and I want to live in the present.

Before I got on the plane, I had to say a proper goodbye to places that were significant to me.

St. Marks Place was the thriving haven for alternative culture. Nowadays it’s just another blandened block that looks indistinguishable from the rest of the richer, whiter Village that’s a shadow of its former glory. But when it was still an incredible place to be, it’s where I came of age. It wasn’t just a place to loiter between punk shows or find the right poufy goth dresses to wear to Batcave, either. It was a community convergence point. Where you met and made friends, lovers and spouses, bands, businesses, you name it.

St. Marks is where I had my first kiss, the first time I fooled around with a guy without having sex, met the man I first had sex with, and the first times I had my heart broken and broke a guy’s heart while I had no feelings for him. I stayed in this city and made it to 36 without an involvement significant enough to meet what’s left of my family or be included in any real estate transactions. (Ladies, don’t let your singlehood stop you if you want to buy! You’ll come out better for it no matter what happens.) After 30, I only dated and had sex on the road and I hadn’t set out for it to happen that way. Then again, I never expected “boned a guy off of LinkedIn on a business trip” to appear on my 2017 bingo card, either.

When I stood by Thompkins Square Park, remembering the decades gone by and how many shows I’d gone to there since I was a teenager with plenty of night loitering when we were too young to go to bars, I felt a smile form rather than tears like I’d expected. I was glad that I had so many memories of the old city, where I can still feel my ancestry beneath my feet on the Lower East Side. The pride of having so much history here, and the wonderful memories with my grandparents, dad, extended family, and chosen family that helped neutralize the horrific shit I grew up with.

It only makes sense my life took place in the northern and southern nodes of the city, representing the polarity and duality within and my own life.

This is a place where you either get out once that job, partner, or apartment doesn’t work out, or you’re here forever. A land where you can have complete anonymity and fade into millions of other faces, yet be remembered for decades. Where despite being the most populous city in the America, neighborhoods and blocks can feel like small towns.

Having so much history and context still fills me with pride and gratitude. But I also grieve what was and what could have been.

When I disembark from that plane, it’s not going to be for games and media industry business or to visit friends in North Hollywood and the Valley.

It’s to start an entirely new life while I still can. Because I want to stop mourning and start living.

Where I’m young enough to want to still go out night after night when we can eventually put this pandemic behind us and find similarly fast-paced people, but old enough to afford a fantastic apartment and arrive fairly well-connected.

I had longed for the familial love denied to me in those Art Deco buildings in The Bronx and adorable saltboxes with the white lace curtains in Borough Park. I sorely miss my grandmother and the proletarian beauty of the old Southbridge Towers, and the character-laden shitty walk-ups off of Grand and Essex where we would frequently go. I grieved incredibly hard that I didn’t get my dream condo near the goth clubs in the Village which I’d love the fuck out of by myself before I shared it with my dream guy, if we didn’t boomerang back to The Bronx or get a house in Peter Steele’s Brooklyn.

Looking for a new apartment as a buyer or renter in NYC is a unique hell. Whereas in in LA, it felt like entering a cheat code in a video game. I had a little anxiety over whether I got the place, but I didn’t have to relentlessly follow up just to find out that someone else with more money got there first. I watched my preferred floorplan like a hawk, immediately applied once it became available again, showed I had money, and it was mine.

I don’t have context for those vast palm-lined streets. Not with family, sexual or romantic partners, or jobs.

When I attended my first E3 in 2015, I stayed at a cheaper hotel outside the official block and was just starting to grow my sky warrior wings.

Back in The Bronx, Sonic Toad Media was young and I was doing gig work to pay my bills as the savings from my last tax office job and eBay purge had run out. Taking this trip was a risk I knew I had to take, but one that was dearly expensive to me at the time.

I tried not to think about the crappy life I had waiting for me back east when I looked up at this glittering building near the Metro and wondered what it would be like to live in such a beautiful place, if I could ever afford it. Where I’d have the whole city at my fingertips so I could easily hit a hardcore show after I got to have lunch with friends, then work on my game and go for a swim. Where I could have the headspace to take my career to a height I didn’t think I could achieve. Maybe even be courted by a guy who’d actually factor me into his life in a significant way where I don’t need to remind him I actually exist, as was the joke of a relationship I was in when I first swiped a Tapcard.

I got an apartment in that exact building. Now I get to find out.