My Life Was Frenetic In My Eagerness To Leave Where I Had Been

Frankenstein of Migration by Christina Cooke

Something changed in my relationship to New York City during the pandemic. I don’t know how to describe it. I’m still figuring out what I mean. In the three years I lived here before March 20, 2020—the day after my thirty-first birthday, when the city of go! go! go! was told to shut up and stop—I thought New York City was fine, perfectly fine I guess, but I was wary. I was in the Big Apple! The city of glitz and glamor! I spent most of my days stepping over dog shit and waiting on crowded platforms for trains that sometimes never showed up.

It is true that there was art to see, and that was nice; delectable places to eat and massive boroughs to explore. But still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the City and I were out of step. I’d seen the films and heard the stories: New York City—America’s mecca for misfits and dreamers, freaks and believers; which is lovely, but there’s also the smog, the high rents, the rats (so many rats), the half-broken subway, the stalled wages, the manholes that sometimes catch fire next to piles of oozing trash, the fucking subway, and always, everywhere, the incessant stench of day-old pee. I found it excruciating. It all felt a bit insufferable. I came to learn that to be in New York City is to be in pain.

I was an adjunct professor in English back then, which meant my life was all rushing down subway stairs to squeeze between closing doors as I shuttled from one classroom to the next. First stop was Fordham in the Bronx via the D, then the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan on the C/E, followed by City Tech in Brooklyn by way of the A—which was ugh because the A was always delayed. But there were breakdancers. Young boys no older than fifteen or sixteen would squeeze onto the cramped subway car, moving their bodies in ways I had only seen in the movies, dancing in front of me, and doing so for free. My phone’s camera roll quickly filled with videos of them popping and locking to trap music warbling from speakers hidden in slim backpacks. I made a point to carry dollar bills just so I had something to give them—a little way to say, thanks for the smile.

I obsessed over the breakdancers when the stay-at-home orders came down. Sitting in the living room of my Washington Heights apartment, I scrolled again and again through their videos, reliving the heat and stink from strollers squeezed next to bicycles and backpacks as the boys kept dancing, their sweaty bodies screaming, alive! My wife and I, we said nothing those first few days. We shuffled around our apartment in stunned silence amid the empty skies and quiet streets, no dogs yelping or music thumping. Outside, the leaves swirled and settled around nothing at all as the Great City stood very, very still.

There was a man who lived on my block. He had a dog—a spoiled little chihuahua, probably about six or seven pounds, with a graying muzzle and tongue always hanging out the side of its mouth. The man liked to smoke on his building’s front stoop with the dog curled up inside his jacket. Didn’t matter that it was spring. He didn’t care that it was no longer cold. He kept the dog close. Everytime I passed with my boxer pup, his chihuahua would peek over the lapel of his jacket then set its face in a nasty snarl. The dog’s whole body shook as it barked, high-pitched screeches that made my shoulders seize. My boxer would perk up then yank on her leash, hyper with excitement. She thought the dog wanted to play. I’d pull her to me, hissing her name again and again to make her calm. I hated this ritual, but there was no avoiding it: his stoop was right next to my building’s front door. But what got me is that he never did anything. Not once did he tell his dog to stop. He’d see us step out and his chihuahua would start barking, then my dog lunging, but he just kept on smoking, his gaze soft and far away.

“What is it about shared experiences of pain that links us so powerfully with others?” Dr. Tracy Brower ponders in her discussion of community cohesion during times of duress. According to her research, “going through crisis causes us to release greater amounts of oxytocin,” a brain chemical that has an interesting effect on groups and relationships as it “tends to make us feel good, connected and concerned for others.”

I did not feel good sitting alone in my apartment. I felt dazed, unmoored, and very, very thirsty. My wife spent most of that first week sneezing. Allergies, she told me, as she made herself another cup of tea.

Like most of the City, we were marooned—our routines, interrupted. I couldn’t stop watching the breakdancing videos. I had a rhythm back then, a way of making sense of the world as I hurried from one classroom to the next. And the breakdancers, they had a show—“Showtime!” they always exclaimed before turning the music up to ten. Did they have the luxury, like me, to sit around feeling sad and frightened at the specter of this tragedy? Or were they still riding the subway, flipping and turning for those “essential” few who still had somewhere to go? 

Groaning, I turned my phone off. You? I imagined them saying, you sittin’ there worried about us? Shared experiences of pain can prompt us to “consider the situation we’re in [and its] impacts on others,” writes Brower, a residual effect of which can be “building understanding and fostering empathy.” All I understood of the boys’ lives was the boom of thick bass as they flipped their snapbacks from their ankles to their elbows in a smooth, rhythmic arc. Was that empathy? Maybe. I wasn’t wholly convinced.

In those first few weeks, I made smoothies and egg cups and cut up scraps of spare fabric to drape across my face. I vacuumed my living room again and again, then researched home workout routines, head arched toward the heat of my phone as I curled up under my comforter in the dark. Sometimes I would stare down the hallway at my apartment’s front door, the hollow metal locked and deadbolted in a definitive dead end. Where was I, then, without the crowded subway and milky bodega coffees? Who was I beyond the busyness of always shuttling somewhere as the City slipped by in a graffiti’d blur? Up until that March, I lived a life always in motion, frenetic in its eagerness to leave where it had been to luxuriate in the potential of what lay beyond.

New York City is the seventh place I’ve lived. Before here, I spent three years in Iowa—two for my second Master’s, one for work—before selling my mattress and leather couch and making the sixteen-hour drive to Brooklyn. I had family in New York. My love was in New York. Before Iowa, there was Vancouver, BC, where I spent two years hanging out with my sister, working odd jobs and doing the dumb things 20-somethings do. Before Vancouver, I was in Fredericton, NB, for my first Master’s. Before, four years in Memphis for undergrad. And before, seven years in a small town in rural Texas, just shy of Houston, where I suffered the godawful torment of middle and high school amid buzzing cicadas and oppressive southern heat.

But before all that, Jamaica.

My birthplace, my first and most beloved home. I lived near the middle of the island in a city called Mandeville until I was almost eleven. I can still feel the cool breeze teasing goosebumps from my skin as I gaze at the banana trees and peppermint bush swaying just beyond my family’s back door.

Whether I wanted it to or not, each place I lived left its mark on me, transforming my tastes in food and patterns of speech, making me already ill-suited for wherever I was headed to next. “[W]e have deeper engagement when we go through tough experiences,” Brower writes. Then there must’ve been something wrong with me. I had been through tough experiences and I did not feel engaged. After my many moves, I started to feel like I belonged everywhere and nowhere—that there was no singular place that could reflect all of me back in a kaleidoscopic dream. “This deeper mental engagement tends to make hard times more memorable,” Brower argues. I did not want to remember. Since leaving Texas, I’d kept on moving, moving, finding grounding and recognition in a life spent always in between. So who was I as I sat cuddling my dog in my too-quiet Manhattan apartment? How could I unfurl into the calm of my loneliness given until who-knew-when that New York was it, that there was nowhere else to go?

When you live a life defined by motion, stasis can feel like an impossible anguish, a cruel and unabating pain.

This man, my neighbor, I don’t know if he had a job. He was always sitting on that stoop with his dog slumped against him, no matter what time I walked by. He usually wore shorts—often black, sometimes brown, with a zip-up hoodie or beat-up leather jacket. And slippers, always slippers, black slides showing the skin on his heels all dry and craggy like the bark of an old tree. I remember he smoked menthols, puffed one right after the other, then shoved the butts under a loose rock in his stoop’s busted bottom step. We never spoke. Sometimes I wondered if he even knew I was there. In my two years of passing him, he never looked at me—never intentionally, at least. Not even when my dog walked up and licked his knee.

According to some experts, our common conception of pain is partial—a pat banality, an overhyped half-truth. “What you are most likely experiencing is what used to be called the ‘healing crisis’,” asserts Dana Bregman, a certified physiotherapist who specializes in therapeutic uses of pain. According to Bregman, pain is not just a sign of sickness; it can also be a harbinger of oncoming healing: as the hardened fascia flexes, trapped toxins flow free in a glorious release. “[T]hese cells communicate with your Amygdala, an area in your brain which holds memory of pain,” Bregman writes, “so it is likely that what you are experiencing temporarily is a brain perception of pain.” Pain as phantom. Not as a siren but a heralding trumpet declaring, good health is on the way.

When I read Bregman’s article in the second week of staying at home, I decided I was going to believe her. My shoulders ached. My head wouldn’t stop hurting. I needed to believe there was a reason for the misery rattling in my feet.

That night, after dinner, my wife offered to massage my shoulders as she sneezed into her shirt. I touched my forehead. Temporary perception of pain. When I lived in Memphis, I had a friend who quipped I wasn’t Jamaican or Texan or even Canadian, but a JaTexaMemphiNadian —a mashup of cultures, a frankenstein of migration. He meant it as a joke; it stung like an accusation. If I wasn’t one thing or another, was I anything? To whom and where did I fully belong? Fascia flexing, pain working its way to the surface. I opened the curtains and looked outside.

About 468,000 people left New York City in the first few years of the pandemic. Who can blame them? Without easy access to restaurants or Broadway or museums or music festivals, no High Line or Dumbo or warm sunsets on the Brooklyn Bridge—what else was there? This is the city of glitz and glamor, damnit! Who in their right mind would withstand all that fear and confusion while hemmed into a small space?

My wife and I, we stayed. We had somewhere else we could’ve gone but we didn’t. Leaving now would be irresponsible, we told ourselves while thinking of the City’s high viral load, of specks of dark sickness hitching a ride on the hems of our shirts. What about all the strangers upstate who might’ve been fine, I wondered, who maybe could’ve survived if it hadn’t been for us? It wasn’t empathy I felt then but terror. I was frightened by the possibility of blame. So instead, my wife and I took turns masking up to buy milk and frozen vegetables from the bodega around the corner as all around us, the incessant scream of ambulance sirens echoed down the barren streets and through our brick walls.

Like the rest of the City, we watched the daily press briefings, stiff with shock as the numbers climbed up. At work, I couldn’t focus. I started to have trouble sleeping. We were in a crisis for which there was not yet any healing cure. “[Y]our subconscious is constantly bracing,” Bregman writes. I glanced at the off-white walls of my Washington Heights bedroom, bracing for the rest of me to chaotically catch up. I was terrified and tired but most of all, I was so very thirsty. Though I downed glass after glass of water, I had become so dehydrated that the skin on the back of my hands had started to peel.

Early one morning, I walked into the kitchen and found my wife with her head in the trash. I thought she was being silly, just trying to manufacture amusement amid such strange times. 

“What are you doing?” I asked with a chuckle.

She stood up, bewildered. “I think I’ve lost my sense of smell.”

I crossed the street but I could still see him. This man, my neighbor, he was eating an apple with his chihuahua curled up on his chest. I fixed my mask and kept my breathing shallow, giving a wide berth to everyone I passed. I was sick, yes, but my dog still needed to pee. Between me and my wife, I was the one who could walk the farthest before needing to take a break.

He took a final bite then threw his apple core into the street, groaning as he pulled himself to standing. As he hobbled up the stairs, I thought of Bregman’s article. I wondered if his thighs ached with every forward movement, sharp snaps in his amygdala screaming, no more, not one day more. Or maybe there was no ache. Maybe his muscles misfired in a deafening numbness, a terrifying nothing where there should have been something. “Hey,” I imagined saying to him, peeling dead skin from my thumb. “Hey, neighbor. Crazy spring we’re having, huh?” Then we’d both laugh as though the weather were the only odd thing roiling our worlds. 

Pain as portent, a crack through the quiet where there should have been noise. My neighbor. I looked up at the high-rise buildings. I tried to remember my neighbors in Memphis and Fredericton and Texas; did I like them and what did they wear? Your subconscious is constantly bracing. I lived in New York City. He was my neighbor. A door creaked open. I looked across the street to see him kiss his chihuahua, then disappear inside.

Six days in, my wife’s breathing turned gravelly and slow. I ran a low fever, mild yet persistent like the panic tightening my chest. We downed Tylenol every four hours like clockwork and isolated from each other, me in the bedroom and she on the couch—but our bodies kept convulsing, coughing fits getting worse. On the morning of the seventh day, we did what the news told us to do: we called the City’s COVID hotline, blurting our symptoms to the triage nurse who answered before she could even say, hello.

“Can you walk up a set of stairs?” she said. “Just one flight. Can you do it without feeling like you’ll pass out?”

I could. My wife? Barely.

“Then stay home.” We weren’t sick enough, the nurse said —and even if we were, there weren’t any beds for us. As it were, she said, there weren’t enough for all the people already there waiting and wheezing, air dank with disease. “Trust me,” she said. “You have a better chance if you stay at home. Call 911 if you get worse. But for now, ride it out where you are.”

The kitchen clock blinked 11:20 a.m. In ten minutes, the daily briefing would begin. That morning, my wife watched it alone. I couldn’t bear the black-and-white graphs with their thin lines stretching up, creeping closer to a devastating oblivion.

Sneezing, I pressed my cheek against the living room window. I could see my neighbor’s toes poking over the front of his slippers, cigarette smoke curling in the still air. I wondered if his chihuahua was asleep, and if he was wearing black shorts that day or brown. Hey neighbor, I murmured in my head, seen anybody interesting pass by? I glanced at the clock again: 11:35, still morning. Maybe he was down there chomping on a bacon, egg, and cheese. Or maybe he was looking around, sensing a bent-over nothing where my body should have been. Everyday for a week I went to the window, searching for signs of him as he smoked and went, let his dog pee and went, his presence as constant as the breeze.

“Going through hard times is one of the things that can create bonds between people,” writes Brower. “In fact, the more difficult the experience, the more bonding that may occur.”

One morning, a Tuesday I think, I gave up on work and slammed my laptop shut. My chest convulsed with a dry, hollow echo from my rough cough. I thought of my apartment’s front door, unyielding and empty. Closing my eyes, I imagined slipping beyond its threshold; I dreamt of stepping off the hardwood into an enthralling beyond. But that time, I felt no thrill. My head still hurt. My skin wouldn’t stop peeling. There was a chasm of desolation where excitement should have been. So instead, I imagined stepping out and hearing the din of New York sidewalk conversations, voices rising in a crescendo of languages I didn’t know. Where would I go, once outside? I opened my eyes. I would go nowhere, just stand there, savoring the fresh feeling of reaching my end—calm yet potent, bright and still. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Where were my slippers? I couldn’t find my slippers. I wanted the pressure. I needed the filth. I craved the sound of the City exhaling, alive! My body ached with sickness but I made myself stand. I just wanted to get back to my window, look down, and see him.

Listen, I don’t know that man. I couldn’t tell you his name or where he was from. But I can tell you that he had a tattoo beneath his left elbow—all warped and faded from too much sun, the black ink bleeding into an off-gray blob. He was missing his top left molar, a soft gap where he sometimes shoved a cigarette then puffed. And when my wife and I got better, when I finally felt good enough to thrust my bare face into the cool air, his chihuahua still barked when it saw me—familiar yip! yip!s that made me look away and laugh.

Both physical and existential pain often crystallizes into closed circuits, repeating patterns of behavior creating hardened fascia on the head and heart. Researcher Søren Ventegodt refers to these circuits as gestalt: a site of recurring tension, an undulating yet “frozen now.” Fear of the unknown is a common gestalt. Fear of familiarity, of staying too long in one place, can be one too. According to Ventegodt, the only way to alleviate an aching gestalt is “[t]o be in holistic process” which is achieved by someone who is “able to trust and receive the holding.” The holding can be many things: it can be a familiar room, a comforting image, the presence of a trusted therapist—a deep and abiding container, therapeutic in its constancy as it carries you through. 

He was my holding. The City is my holding. Not because either gave me the answers but because they provided the prompting I needed to acknowledge the question.

JaTexaMemphiNadiYorker? JaTexaMemphiYorkAnadian? I’m not here to deliver good news from the other side. The ache still lingers. I am not healed. 

But what I can tell you is that pain can be a revelation, an enigma charting new pathways to what is honest and true. I stopped wandering in New York. I got married in New York. I made deep, new friendships that helped me look at myself anew. Here, I committed myself to working toward what really mattered, finishing my debut novel Broughtupsy published in January 2024—about wandering and migration, about finding and savoring a self-constructed sense of home. I even shed the shame and finally admitted I hate the subway, switching to a remote job where my farthest commute is from my bedroom to my couch. In this beast of a City, I’ve come to learn that there is no space here for outsized fantasy—that amid the highrises and honking traffic, there is no room for flimsy self-delusion.

Eventually, my dog stopped reacting to his chihuahua. It was understood that we would never speak. Around the same time, I discovered what Ventegodt refers to as salutogenesis which is the antithesis of gestalt, representing “a ‘sense of coherence,’ an experience in the depth of life.” My salutogenesis is this: I am not coherent. My love for curry goat and snowy winters and Texas brisket and all things Aaliyah and Sum 41—I am a frankenstein, a collection of rich fragments, each shard reflecting prismatic in the motley of me.

Soon after the vaccines came out, he expanded his wardrobe to include one pair of white jeans, frayed slits showing pink skin on the tops of both thighs. Sometimes I’d pass him with his phone on his stomach, speakerphone blasting while he chatted with a friend. Other times he’d be sipping on a coffee, brown stains streaked across the paper cup as he touched his lighter to a fresh cigarette. He never wore a mask. Why would he? Yip! Yip! That’s not the kind of man he was.

It’s been two years since I last saw him. I don’t know what happened. Maybe he got priced out and moved to another borough. Or maybe he joined the 468,000 and left the City to build a cheaper life somewhere else. Over eight million New Yorkers continue to persist amid the pandemic. About 50,000 of us so far have died. I wish I knew which one he was.

Now, when I pass his stoop, my dog strains to sniff the rock where he kept his cigarette butts. I’ll let her search for a moment, her nose twitching against the black concrete as I glance at the spot where his body’s supposed to be. Sometimes I’ll hear nothing. Or I’ll hear music thumping from a passing car. But sometimes—these are the terrible times—I’ll hear the far-off echo of sirens, sharp and threatening. Then I’ll touch the cold concrete and hurry my dog along, blinking hard against the need to weep.

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