Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us. — Colson Whitehead
Last summer on the terrace of a luxury apartment in downtown Brooklyn we were arrested mid-sentence by the flutter of something red. The bug landed on the table and we leaned over to examine its unusual pattern, black spots on white with a tightly packed wingtip, and a deep crimson body that we could see through the sheer wings. It was majestic, glamorous to match the view, a jacket to make Cruella de Vil jealous. Wolf, three years old at the time, and I leaned our heads together over it, and I felt calm and excited, to be discovering a rare natural new beauty with this young friend. We can still have nice things in New York, I thought.
A week later, in Madison Square Park, the same insect landed next to me on the bench. A month later, back in Tokyo, I came across an article in The New York Times about an incredibly aggressive invasive pest that had taken over the city. “Die, Beautiful Spotted Lanternfly, Die” was the headline. On Instagram was a photo exactly like one I’d taken, with the hed, “If you see this beautiful insect, please kill it.”
This week in downtown Manhattan, I was on an even more ridiculous terrace if possible, taking a fitness class. A cry went out. “Kill it! Kill it!” Sneakers smashed against wings, and the sound of endorphins-amped triumph could be heard by the window washers hanging off the side of 1 World Trade Center. The lanternflies are back in the northeast US for the summer, it seems. Several more landed between jumping jacks that morning, and we squashed them all.
I went to AAA earlier in the week, and I was surprised to see the same older South Asian lady from August 2021 who had denied me a refund for something, and the same younger (more helpful) South Asian lady manager sitting in her booth like a throne in the middle of all the desks. I don’t know why I found this remarkable, that people should keep the same jobs year to year. Yet continuity seems hard to come by.
There are a few rituals when I’m back in town, but it gets harder each year to keep up with them. Two of my old yoga studios have closed, pandemic-hit and priced out, and of the eight or nine instructors I used to follow, only one is still working in the city. Heidi and I went to a club we’d been to many years ago, and even though the techno was alternating between pretty hard and pretty far-out, it was overrun by bros and normies and tourists clearly there just to graze butts. Keeping up with the scene takes full-time attention, and involves at the very least living in New York, so I should have been less surprised when I went to a favorite bar, and it was just medium. “I would not assume just because you loved a place 4 years ago that it is still awesome,” Heidi texted me, with just the tiniest hint of “you should know better.” I’ve taken to texting her before I go to any of my old haunts. “Is this place still good?”
I’m reminded of this Colson Whitehead favorite: “No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. … You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.” He pushes us to let go of the past city at the same time that he romanticizes the clinging. Feel nostalgia: It’s what New Yorkers do. I want to let go, I do. I will. I give up the chance to have that pleasure again, loosen my grip and let it slide into the rushing river of change and impermanence. We were lucky enough to have had even that one brief beautiful moment. Some people never love this much. This is New York, this is being alive, what choice do I have?
And yet. And yet. I hold onto a lot of beauty still. There’s this bar that has become almost legend for us. George Washington Bar opened in February 2018 at the Freehand Hotel, and Sarah and I went the next month. We hadn’t caught up in a while. It was an especially turbulent moment in our trajectories: She had two shiny new job offers, and I had decided to leave New York, but I had no real estate plan. We had a lot to discuss. We opened the menu, and there was a drink called For Sarah that had cardamom, pomegranate, creme, and egg white. We dove. Our drinks had key lime pie and carrot cake and yogurt flavors. I came out seeing my exit plan for New York. It was a night of froth and mirth and logistics in life-changing proportions.
I went back in December of that year. I paid $17 for a watery Manhattan. I texted Heidi in confusion. Had I dreamt the whole thing? What had happened to the vision? She said there had been a fight over the direction of the bar program and the creator had quit sometime in the summer or fall. The scene-changing brilliance had lasted all of five minutes. Ah. I should have known better.
Maybe that’s why I felt some comfort when I saw the Tribeca terrace littered with the carcasses of lanternflies. In a city of constant flux, this luxe predator, beautiful and dangerous and much buzzed-about, hadn’t been priced out yet, hadn’t been replaced by some mediocre copy. What was there before is as real and solid as what is here now; Munsey’s is still Munsey’s. See you next summer?