When All the Leaves Are F%@ing Dead

I’m hardly the first or last Medium author to discuss making that great westward migration from New York to LA.

It’s an entire genre that oft goes on a vocation-based and/or navel-gazing jag about how much you can’t stand the crowded, dilapidated subways and now you get this nice easy life where apartments have actual amenities and there’s parking at Trader Joe’s. Where inevitably, the comment section fills with assholes from New York and New Jersey casting their age-old antipathy aside to unite in their cries of “Good riddance!” and beleaguered Angelenos moan “Great, another East Coast asshole moving here to take up all the parking.” (Don’t worry, new neighbors. My car-free life is coming with me. Your parking is safe.)

I know, because I’ve read countless pieces in this vein in trying to relate my own journey to them. And the same groups crop up every time. The comment section predictably populates like an Excel sheet full of stagnant cash flow forecasts. And I just can’t really think of anything more pathetic than castigating someone on their choice of relocation with such open hostility.

Does this come from the tendency to tie our origins so closely to our identities?

After all, it was a huge point of pride for me to be a New Yorker, my nearly 1.5 centuries-long history tracing back to when The Bronx was mostly farmland informing a great deal of my cultural identity. Descending from generations of public employees who served this city, then state, with pride made it seem irrevocable.

People got their reasons for staying in or leaving someplace. They can be practical, idealistic, financially motivated, or downright stupid. And everything in life has risk. But my travels and being forced in quarantine have been making me think about the concept of home, and the idea of “putting down roots”.

With millions of people in my generation being unable to attain the traditional success markers like buying a home, marrying later in life or skipping it altogether, opting out of children like I have or being heartbroken that the choice to have a child before 40 was taken away from you? There’s a lot of talk about feeling rootless. Especially since pre-COVID, Millennials and Zoomers were often encouraged to just take that first “good” job, even if you have to move for it. When I read this heartbreaking Ask Polly letter in The Cut, it felt like being smacked in the head with a construction beam: it was precisely the kind of future I feared.

Personally, I’d always been resentful of the idea of an employer telling me where to go. Why the fuck should I uproot for some job that could lay me off at any time, likely paying out of pocket to move somewhere for some employer with zero loyalty? Screw that, I’m in a city where there’s literally millions of jobs! At least if I get fired or it’s so bad I have to quit, I got my friends and family.

Then I ended up building the kind of digital media career I always dreamed of, the type can easily throw in a backpack, and subsequently gained more economic stability than any job ever gave me. Now I could leave or stay at my own discretion. And at the time I began my career change to go all in on games and writing, staying made sense.

I closed on my condo, time passed, I had various career ups and downs in the new world I inhabited. Then I noticed something.

Sure, I hit a lot of the financial markers many people my age are having difficulty with. I’m certainly grateful and not complaining about that. But everything that letter writer commiserated about to Ask Polly? It was hitting hard that my personal life was starting to resemble the author’s: my father about an hour away in Jersey seemed to be my only reason for staying because all my close friends were at least two hours away, if not farther.

I did the veritable complete opposite of what my generation did: I managed to buy a place in my home city and put down roots. But rather than a lack of growth, all that came up was dead.

All the leaves are dead. They’re fucking dead.

I don’t have any desire to have kids, so I’m not full of angst about not starting a family. But I lost my toad in 2016, and by the time I finally felt emotionally ready to welcome another amphibious baby into my life, the constant travel began.

But if I did? Well, that’d be a problem given that I don’t date in this place. Literally. I do not. Whether it was by accident of universal forces or what, but the last date I had within the city limits was 2016. The day after the fucking election. Everything after that? Has been a minimum of 100 miles from home. Until foot surgery derailed my personal life right before the pandemic struck, I’ve been wined and dined in Chicago and Portland. I was asked out twice to Philadelphia. My infamous “I hooked up off of LinkedIn” story took place in Vegas. All without dating apps.

Dear reader, I don’t know how you feel about signs from the universe. But while I got my business-y and rational side, I’m a believer. And I damn well took this as a sign that if a childfree guy who wants to share my life of toads, games, and travel exists? I’m not going to find him if I stay here. Hey, I wonder if P.S., I Love You will have me back to discuss this after I already dove into my love of toads?

Otherwise, I have no family left here. All the family I came home for post-exile almost 20 years ago? Dead, or dead to me.

So, I’ve mostly stayed out of practicality. Owning in The Bronx is a million times cheaper than my alternatives above the border or across the river: lowest real estate taxes in the city and no need for a car. But my travels, and most of all, my returns showed me it was time to go if I wanted something more verdant than dead leaves.

I could wax all day about how New York has changed, mostly for the worse thanks to private equity vultures turning everything into chains. But even if we magically resurrected the irresistible mix of grit and glamour that colored the city I knew in 1992? LA still calls. I have no history there other than going for E3, making friends in the industry and via social media over the last few years, and the ill-fated British Invasion festival in 2006 which made me not like it at first. Southern California was actually not love at first sight here!

But what struck me most of all was that it was the only city I’d been to with the life and career I have now, where I felt truly loved and appreciated for it.

I’d never seen such…infrastructure for free agents the way I had in LA. Sure, New York’s still a creative and entrepreneurial powerhouse. It’s a center of the universe for many people and industries. But ultimately, it’s a 9–5 kind of town. For a city that never sleeps, it sure felt sedated even pre-COVID.

I could just talk about my games and writing without having to answer ten million questions about how I make money. Countless places I could just throw down my laptop without being kicked out. I’d never felt so much like I found a missing puzzle piece as I had when I was in this coffee shop in Melrose that not only didn’t act like I asked for the barista’s first-born upon requesting almond milk, but THERE WAS AN OUTLET AT EVERY SEAT. That shit is rarer than a rent-controlled classic six. Given the culture and infrastructure for entrepreneurial types and creatives I just never saw back east, it makes the passage of laws like AB5 even more fucking baffling.

Uprooting and moving across the country is a huge deal at any age.

Perhaps it’s the kind of thing most people would’ve done while younger and foolhardier. But the fact that I’m doing it while older, wiser, with less tolerance for bullshit, and a real bankroll compared to the last few times I moved? It’s only getting me more excited at the prospect. I’m choosing this, not family or an employer. I’m going for my own happiness.

I constantly look at maps of West Hollywood and Greater Wilshire and think about the apartment I’m going to get there, where a Realtor I spoke with was flabbergasted at how in my homeland, the prevailing form of buying a home is to basically beg a bunch of people to throw down a shitload of money to be their neighbor.

Well, this girl’s tired of begging for scraps of half-assed versions of things. Tired of the constant reminders of what was and what could’ve been. I didn’t feel that way in all my journeys to and from the west coast. I gradually fell in love with every business trip or layover, wondering why I’d feel so sad and empty when I got home: it’s because I felt love and support in California that I didn’t here. After my tour in 2017, when I was away from home the longest I’d ever been in my adult life, I found myself questioning if I had romantic and/or professional futures out west. Even after having a month-long depression spell after GDC 2018, I still didn’t acknowledge I wanted to go west.

2019, it just came out. I knew at E3 when I was riding the bus on Hollywood Boulevard and Fairfax and literally gasped at the most beautiful vista I’d ever seen, and all I wanted to do was play hooky the rest of the conference to explore. After all, when I got into my Lyft from LAX, the driver asked me, “Good to be home, huh?” and I laughed and said I was just in town for E3. But if there ever was a sign…

All along, I wanted to relocate but held onto my idea of the old New York that I and my family always knew and the life I should be having as a result of putting roots down and staying. But that’s just not how it turned out.

People always say “Don’t move to run away from your problems!” and there’s a ring of truth to that. But what if you realize your problem is that it’s time to go, and a major move is how you’ll do it?

I have no guarantee things will change upon my sojourn west. There’s still friends near the city I will miss, and the thought of my dad not being just an hour drive or train ride away hits me hard. But I also have budding friendships out there and people I got yet to meet. At the very least, I’ll have a nicer place to live. And no, I’m still not driving. All those “NYC to LA” guides are written for spoiled Manhattanites, not Bronxites who are used to long bus rides.

But I’ve spent much of quarantine realizing that I’ve been in some perpetual state of mourning or another for a greater part of my life. I’m not only tired of settling, I’m tired of mourning people and places. Grief colored too much of my life and I’m not bad or vapid for wanting to just get the fuck away from all that grief and start over in a place where I can choose happiness.

I’m not that young anymore, but there’s still time to plant new seeds in a new city that cradles so many of my dreams. Now it’s time to go from dream to delivery.