If New York doesn’t scare you then you’re doing it wrong. 

I learned quickly that the capital N - Y New York I’d seen on TV was a lie. This illumination came with a frightening emptiness and a dreadful sense of unbelonging. That’s the first lesson of moving to New York : 1. You will never really feel like you belong.

It starts off with little things; strange looks from the barista at Starbucks when you attempt to engage her in small talk, or the impatient sighs as local by local passes you on the sidewalk. You’ll gag when you walk over the subway grate in late August, the smell of warm trash marinated with the musk of the underground rushing up at you in a hot, muggy wave. You’ll get conned into signing up for monthly donations to a charity that your realize, belatedly, might not exist. You won’t think you have an accent ( your “I”s sound more like “ah”s, and most New Yorkers don’t say y’all all that much) but it turns out you do. You tell yourself not to wince when you scan your credit card at CVS, but you do anyway. 

Little things tend to avalanche out of control (you could compare this to a snowball but you won’t have seen snow till your first New York Winter). You won’t notice the stress, the ache at the corners of your eyes or the way you keep scratching at your arm like you’re trying to dig something out of your own skin. That’s the next part of moving to New York: your own unbelonging will affect you. 

My first night in New York City was characterized by the sticky toss--turning of a half person chasing foggy sleep with a butterfly net. The bulbs of highrise buildings make night a grating fluorescent day. I spend hours staring at peoples’ lives flickering on/off one by one in the apartment building across from mine, different rooms and different people joined with me in unified insomnia. The endless grid of lights stays burnt into my eyelids for weeks, a Loony Toons reminder of how the City that Never Sleeps likely got its name. 

The third factor of moving to New York: You will never really understand it all. I came into New York a wild vision of the hometown I left behind (the rare outlier not attending a local college in the south), but now it’s been over a year and I still have no clue what the 6 train is or where it’s going. 

Within my first week of living in the Big Apple the neck pains came. Had surgery been an option, I likely would have implanted a stent to angle my head at a permanently upward tilt. This pain is a symptom of the fourth factor of moving to New York (and it’s a dead giveaway of your newness). 

I came to New York stumbling drunk with nerves, peach leaves in my hair and eighteen years worth of Georgia Red clay wedged deep beneath my toenails; wild and starry eyed, like every other small town girl with big city dreams (it’s all dreadfully cliche). New York is a city as stubborn as its inhabitants, growing vertical while other cities spread horizontally. It’s a city built on proving people wrong, on backwards thinking, upside down logic, and lofty ideas. It’s unlike any city. 

And that’s why you will look up. 

My feet hit the sidewalk (layered with years of gum and old cigarette butts) and my head snapped back. I stayed like that for several days, bumping into people on crosswalks and tripping over trash bags. New York is approximately thirteen miles long, but New York gives small a new meaning. Towering high rises, imposing skyscrapers, windows as far as the eye can see all winking cerulean blue in the undiluted sunlight.

You will look up. 

Back home in Georgia I slept like a baby -- the night dark and unperturbed by city lights. When I was sixteen I dipped a sewing needle into brown India Ink and self-inflicted a tattooed constellation Orion onto my left ankle. The stars at home are clear; on particularly dark nights the stripe of the Milky Way will hang suspended, as if resting just above the highest branches of the oak trees. I’ve been looking up my whole life. 

This past December, I was walking downtown from the Met (towards an Italian restaurant where my boyfriend and I would accidentally buy a fifty dollar bottle of Sauvignon Blanc). It was the first notably cold day of that winter, with winds tunneling down avenues in relentlessly biting streams. The sky was deep blue velvet, crystal save the occasional fluff of cloud twisting rapidly through the air. The East Side at night is most aptly described as calmly postapocalyptic (everyone is either tucked up in their Brownstones watching a weeks worth of DVRed TV or drinking overpriced cocktails in a swanky Village bar). We walked, accompanied by the whistling wind and our own murmuring conversation. 

I was looking up. 

(He commented on this often, amused at my clumsy tripping -- walking due to skyward bound eyes). 

To review, you will never feel like you belong. You will be bothered by this feeling, and others will notice that you’re different. You will never understand it all. You will make smalltalk, you will walk haphazardly down avenues (“Is this Amsterdam or Columbus?”). You will jump at honking taxis, and you will be too wired at the end of each day to sleep. You will look up. But you will find that other people, settlers like you, do these things too. 

“Did you see the moon tonight?” 

The crackle of aged vocal cords, the gentility of having seen enough good in the world to outweigh the bad, the voice of a small elderly woman came from behind me at a street corner not too far from our destination. I had spent blocks locked in a holy staring contest with the perfect half circle above. 

“Yes!” I said happily. The woman faltered, and her eyes changed (deep blue and shiny in the sheen of moonlight). A familiarity, a sense of (finally) belonging and connection, and then her shaky voice: 

“Do you always look up?” 

It’s these little things that take you back thousands of miles away; these moments that clog your throat with early winter’s goldenrods and wild onion grass, send birdsong ringing in your ears and sprout thick grass beneath your feet. New York is a hard place, full of rushing life and sharp edges. The natives breathe like furnaces and carve trenches in the ground that is so very theirs. But you are wild and starry eyed and unbelonging and scared; you are confused and stumbling. You are looking up. You will always look up. 

“Yes.” 

She softened before me, the city bright with moonlight. She looked up, and I could tell she felt the goldenrod, heard the birdsong, felt the grass too. She too was a settler. 

“You’re not from here.” 

(A statement, not a question. I didn’t feel the need to answer; I watched her look up.) 

“Don’t stop looking up.” 

I’m still not all sure she was real, but I remember the wind and the halo of the moon that night. I remember her voice and I remember her words. I remember to look up (that has never changed). 

New York will scare you; but it will awe you, inspire you, push you to bamboo -- bend past what you thought was your breaking point. New York will scare you, but you will keep looking up, and not even New York can take that away from you.