Liars, Cheats & Outer Boroughs

Lauren ascended the litter-strewn stairs in Brooklyn a liar who’d been cheated.

She lied to herself as the sun hit her shoulders. This heat feels nice. It did not. It was humid, unforgiving and as encapsulating as a cage.

Her large suitcase trailed behind her on the sidewalk, creaking upon each rotation of the weather worn wheels, as she looked toward the intersection of Crown Heights that housed the building which housed the apartment which housed the room that she would now be calling her own space. A space of her own. Finally.

I can’t wait to make a dent in this city! This would become a lie. She would depart by car in less than two years. The city at large would not register her impact. Her arrival and departure would be the slightest of anatomical shifts within the cellular body that was her city block.

She would internalize and take with her what the city had given her, but she would leave little behind for the city itself aside from cigarette butts and a pair of shoes abandoned in Prospect Park after day of drinking wine on the grass with someone she’d force herself to believe she loved. That love affair would make her less a liar than a stranger to herself, but she had no way of knowing that while crossing the sun-bleached pavement of Nostrand Avenue in the August heat.

She came here on purpose. She came here to find poetry in the shifting of the seasons above concrete, purpose in the towering manhattan skyline, and love in the brownstones, dive bars, rooftops, back alleys, anywhere. She came here running blindly towards what she’d been cheated of in her past.

She was cheated of emotional security when the man who’s name she swore she’d never utter again stopped returning her calls. She’d been cheated of the comfort with which she watched those around her navigate the world because she grew up in a culture and home that celebrated bodies so different from her own they seemed alien and otherworldly. And she was cheated of the truth every time she was told she wasn’t enough.

Her legs, much too big and much too hairy, were doing a perfectly fine job of carrying her to her new apartment.

Her hair, kept boyishly short despite her long jaw and mother’s admonition, had garnered nothing so much as a second glance since she arrived at Port Authority.

Her soul, a sensitive and desperately aching one, might have known that this was only a blip in her life’s plan and not the beginning of something lasting, but it communicated nothing in the moment. It shone only hope.

It’s easy to lie to the hopeful.

It’s easy to cheat the inexperienced.

It’s not easy to turn a heavy, sticky August heat to honey.

After the dive bars, and brownstones, and skylines, and back alleys, and rooftops had faded and crystalized behind Instagram filters and memories of times gone by, Lauren would look in the mirror and smile as the memories turned to nectar in her veins. Thin, off-color and sweet.

At points in her life lived further inland and abroad she’d share an anecdote of her time in New York and be met with astonishment.

“You lived there? I could never! Did you love it?”

“Oh, yes,” she’d lie, “it was lovely.” It was not. It was loud and dirty and fraught with heartbreak and alcohol and, on top of it all, expensive. But she’d be cheating them of the fantasy if she told them her truth. She’d be cheating herself of her cultivated ability to turn the soul-wrenching experiences into nourishment for her being.

Lauren might be a liar who’d been cheated of what she needed at one point in time, but not now. Brooklyn had promised her nothing, owed her nothing, and given her nothing for free. She would feel for some months and years following her departure that her soul had been crushed and misshapen.

When her soul was filled again, though, it was slowly inflated and reformed and made all the more malleable by a resilient and healing balm that had not existed before Brooklyn in August.

That was the truth.