Back on My Bulls**t: Brooklyn Redux
My former nightmare turned into a dream vacation
Back on My Bullshit are intermittent, totally idiosyncratic travelogues. Don’t worry, I give standard recommendations below but this isn’t your mom’s Travel & Leisure city guide.
As I write this, it’s been exactly two months since I landed at La Guardia airport to begin a three-week stay in Brooklyn.
The reason for my trip? A final follow-up appointment with an ENT doctor to make sure my esophagus was completely healed. The reason for a three-week stay? I wanted to enjoy a summer that had been denied to me, when I flew out to Lima in early June and found myself in the city’s abysmal foggy winter. A friend was getting married in Chicago in September and it was more cost-efficient to wait out the time between my appointment and the wedding in the US. Given my persistent financial perils, this felt indulgent.
Given how much I loathed living in Brooklyn the past two years, this felt like tempting fate. Like I was Jack from Lost making an irrational decision to go back to the island instead of staying put in a land free of growling polar bears and secretive Dharma Initiatives. (Amazing that I still remember details of the most disappointing TV investment of my life.)
I’m not really one to get “triggered”, in whatever erroneous way our TikTok-infected brians are using the term now. I don’t break down when I pass by a bar where an ex and I used to hang, for example, and I don’t feel panic when I have to walk down the halls of a hospital where I nearly died. But I do hold certain beliefs about lands. Some geographies hold you with a warm, comforting embrace. Others serve as a springboard for you dreams. Others unleash your most feral, celebratory side. And others truly spit you out.
Brooklyn spit me out. And then it laughed. And then it spit me out some more. Those two years were not the first time I had lived in New York—I lived in the area in my childhood (idyllic) and in my 20s (where the only thing I liked about my life in the city was the city)—so I could not understand its change of heart. All I knew was that it no longer wanted me and I sure as hell did not want it. I figured my three-week stint would be a calm, but tense standoff. Nothing terrible would happen, but nothing great would happen either. I’d see my friends, go to the beach, and spend my days working. The operative word was “chill”. If I demanded nothing of it, maybe Brooklyn wouldn’t even notice I was there. It would leave me alone.
Instead, Brooklyn gave me some of the happiest weeks of the year. Maybe even of the past four years. It was like being with a new lover for the first three weeks of a relationship, before you uncover all the flaws that will eventually sour your affair.