My Downstairs Crush

Leaving New York, and leaving other things

my old neighborhood

“Are you going to channel Joan Didion and write an essay about leaving New York?” my downstairs neighbor asked on my last night in the city. I think he was trying to make fun of me? It was Christmas Eve and we were eating takeout Chinese food. My belongings — books and mugs and old yearbooks and the floofy aviator hat a sort-of-boyfriend once gave me on his last night in the city — were in the back of a truck. I was putting them in storage.

Neighbor and I had been saying “hi” and “hey” to each other for weeks. I’d catch him by the trash cans. Actually, that’s where we first met: the trash.

“I’m in 4F, up there,” I said, pointing to my window, three floors above the trash.

“Oh, hey. I’m Jonah. 1F.”

I immediately had a crush on him, but you knew that already. That’s how it works sometimes, I guess: The month you plan to leave your city, the city spirits start sending little messages to get you to stay. (The “city spirits” are rats, I think. Or maybe those tiny Greek people on the coffee cups.) I’d leave my apartment carrying a single clove of garlic just so I could throw it out (and nonchalantly glance at 1F’s windows). I imagined a future in which, like an heiress who lives “between” Paris and New York, I’d live “between” 4F and 1F…