I remember driving to Jersey City from Toronto, arriving in Newark around 3am after a road trip that was really a long traffic jam punctuated by occasional gestures of motion, navigating something called jughandles along the way. I had landed in a city that I had only seen from the sky once before. As I approached Newark along I-280 on a clear June night, the Empire State Building was lit up in white, and the rest of the skyline announced itself for the first time. I almost did an about-turn in the middle of the freeway.
That image of the skyline still haunts me to this day. Back then, ground zero was still just ground. There was no yang to the Empire State Building's yin.
In my first week I took the PATH to the WTC station. As the train careened around a curve to enter the station, a concrete wall ran alongside the tracks, a narrow slit offering glimpses of what lay beyond: emptiness where the towers once stood, cranes in the distance, the city mid-thought about what came next. The station itself was underground, without the marble finishes of the Oculus to upholster it. It carried on its business oblivious to the vast construction site above. The site and I were both mid-demolition, neither of us sure yet what we were becoming.
I moved here with all my belongings loaded into the car, knowing there was only NYC with nothing but the ocean beyond. Nothing left to lose but myself.
I had arrived in America as a student in Denver in the spring of 1999, exactly a month before Columbine, and before everyone I knew could find Denver on a map. Denver taught me how to live in America. New York would teach me why I'd come.
I moved here broke, unemployed, and without prospects, in a 2000 Buick LeSabre my father had left behind, a car in a perpetual state of breaking down, on a student visa that was fast approaching the end of its runway, to a city sitting in the shadow of Lady Liberty.
I lived with five other working professionals in a two-bedroom at 316 St Pauls Ave in Jersey City, a far cry from the swankiness the area has since become. Journal Square will soon have a Whole Foods. Back then, whole and foods didn't belong in the same sentence describing my life. Fine dining in Journal Square was the local White Castle, which served as the end cap to a litany of Indian restaurants and stores on Newark Ave.
I traveled to work every day on the A train to the northern reaches of Manhattan. A coffee and a $1.60 egg sandwich were where I found nutrition, while I struggled to find friendship, belonging, and a way to solvency. Perhaps the loneliest experiences were around not having anyone to share the sorrows of failure or even the joys of getting my first professional experience in an unfamiliar city. Instead, I took comfort in a weekend lunch buffet in Curry Hill. Drinking a mango lassi with that meal felt like living in the lap of luxury. W's nukes for mangoes deal had yet to bear fruit.
"You never speak up," a colleague once told me in that first job, one I was eminently not qualified for when they hired me. I was part of a six-person working group discussing Expanding New Media Approaches in Graduate Education, or some such thing. I couldn't tell her that I'd grown up believing you spoke when spoken to, something I'd struggled with all through college.
Those words stalked me for many, many years, keeping me from talking about my skills and accomplishments during interviews, from getting the girl of my dreams, from asking myself the questions that might have led me toward the life I wanted, including writing this piece. I carried myself as though my presence required permission.
That is the tax this city levies on the ones who arrive without a net. Not the debt, not the visa clock, not the egg sandwich breakfasts. The silence you learn to keep, and then forget you're keeping.
Solvency came, almost six years after I started digging for a path. Six years of digging. Seven of not seeing my mother. Eventually I found the way to hold on to the ground under my feet. There was love, too. And loss — mostly loss — until I found peace and a better way to live with myself in myself.
This city can take you to a higher level of success than you could have dreamed for yourself. But it exacts a cost for doing so. What no one tells you when you arrive, what you can only learn by staying, is that the cost and the education are the same thing. The city gives you exactly what you need; if you're lucky, some of what you want. It just doesn't tell you in advance what it's going to charge.
Decades later, it teaches me the basics of reinventing myself every day, the way a veteran guitarist is still learning to play a chord, a drummer still learning to strike the hide just so.
The city still intoxicates without checking my ID first. And it still compels me to give my best.
The silence breaks. Not all at once. But it breaks.
Even now I am still learning when to speak and when to stay quiet. The difference is I no longer assume the silence is natural.