I am rarely home in the middle of the summer. On occasion I find myself in Colorado, or Florida, or Los Angeles. I stay with friends or family, and sometimes a strange melange of friends, family and friends-of-friends. This summer is a variation on the theme: I am far from home, dragging my bags down the streets of New York. Because my sister worked for the local theater, we couldn’t travel as a family that summer. Unwilling to be confined by my tiny hometown, I tagged along on my father’s business trip.
Four hours away, in Washington, D.C., my father endures lengthy meetings and extended lunches. “You have friends in New York,” he said. “It’s a short bus ride to New York.” I went, but my series of short-notice phone calls led me nowhere: “I’m busy. I’m sorry!” or “I’d love to meet up, but it’s my brother’s birthday.” Can’t blame them for not dashing into the city on a moment’s notice. I’m not the only one who travels during the summer.
Instead, I’m at a hostel. And I can’t hide my luggage. I push it further under the bed, but a corner still peeks out, inviting theoretical roommates to grab and steal and furtively disappear. I handed over my laptop to the twitchy teenager at the front desk, praying to Jesus she took it to locker two and didn’t pass it off to her drug dealer for a few extra grams.
I take a deep breath. The dingy bed is covered in hospital-white sheets. Maybe they’re trying to lull me into a false sense of security so I’m not alarmed when two greasy Australian ravers interrupt my sleep at 3 a.m. with the aftershock of their nights out and the stench of late-night cigarettes.
At 11:41 p.m. in the city that never sleeps, I’m curled up in the blanket I had to beg for from the hostel night-hours manager, and I’m alone. The other travelers staying in my room have yet to return from the bars and concerts and bright lights. I’m alone. Ear-numbing tribal beats trickle through my third-floor walls, pulsating from the lobby dance club I can’t enter because my ID says 1988. I’m alone. I’m alone, overcome with the inane need to validate at least three stereotypes of Midwesterners in my two-day stay: confused, overwhelmed and – oh yeah – small girl, traveling alone.
Five minutes later, I’ve grabbed my laptop, shoved it into my dirty red messenger bag and am on the hunt for a Starbucks, a 24-hour Internet café or any open store I can briefly occupy. I’m not picky. Heat rises from the manholes, and sweat trickles from my hairline and covers my back.
A rattling jingle across the street announces the arrival of the one who will become my nemesis over the next ten blocks: a crinkly old Asian man nudging a shopping cart down the narrow street, carrying a sign: “Please help. I am homeless.” In the night everything is terrifying: the wheels catch on the sidewalk’s shoulder, falling to the ground with an unnerving crunch. I adjust my bag and quicken my pace. I barrel through the streets, blocking out the clatter of the shopping cart behind me. He crosses the street. I can’t put on my headphone for fear of sneak attacks.
For a few breathless moments I hear no rattle or clatter of the shopping cart — perhaps he has turned the corner, given up the chase? A loud cough echoes from the black streets behind me. Still there.
I begin to prepare battle plans as I approach 32nd and 6th. If he comes from my left, I have my car keys in hand. From my right: solar plexus, instep, nose and groin. My knuckles are popped and primed and my shoes are tight. I’m ready to run.
From behind me, I hear coins clinking against the pavement. I find the old man stooped over, sweeping up the day’s change from the spilled cup in his cart. For a second I debate helping, but I recoil: It’s only a trick to bring me closer, so close he can slip his hands around my neck.
I make a right onto Broadway and the brilliant lights of Times Square down the street are an anesthetic, forcing my doubts down my windpipe, letting them rumble in my stomach briefly before floating into nothing. Bright lights shine in the big city, overflowing with strange human-like animals ravenous for more. I had been here before without letting the swelling darkness and the sticky streets clench my throat and twist my vocal cords into a balloon animal. I’d just never been here alone.
The wrinkled old man stumbled across the street, clutching a brown paper bag in his shopping cart and curling into a muddy corner. Wrapped in a ball of heavy brown clothing, he no longer posed a threat. How could I presume the tiny, drunk man could hurt me, even if he had intended to? With him gone, there was no one else for me to cling to. Alone in Times Square is different than being alone in a dusty hostel room. People rushed around me, but none of them belonged to me.
The last two streets seemed an endless stretching wasteland, as the lights of Times Square never moved closer and the stores I walked by were already closed. I traveled on, my laptop bag pinching my shoulder in violent protest. At 42nd Street, I was caught in an eddy of bodies and sucked into the crowd, pushed from street corner to storefront with little choice or decision of my own.
I’ve never been scared of crowds or large spaces or lights, but the separation from emotional human contact made me nervous and made me twitch, paranoid that I still embodied every miserable misconception I hoped to prove wrong: Kansas girl visits the big city, goes crazy.
I stumbled into a Starbucks on a friendly shove from a drunken girl sprinting towards 47th Street. The store was silent, save the brief, uncomfortable exchange between the barista and me. I settle into a rusty red seat, letting the air conditioner make me a blanket of cool air. Outside, the revelers put on a performance for me, tripping, falling, shouting, laughing; I was their overwhelmed audience.
No stranger to bustle and traffic and fifty-story (and more) buildings, I still felt lost as the barista handed me my low-fat milk latte before burying her head in a Gabriel García Marquez novel – the same waiting to be read on my nightstand at home.
The bell on the door tinkled, announcing someone’s arrival with the stench of liquor, weed and cigarettes. The rank odor filled the room on the shoulders of four white-collar Midtown twenty-somethings who teetered towards the table next to me. The girl looked at me and at my laptop. “Why aren’t you at a club?” she asked, making a valid point. I’m nineteen, in New York and sitting rather pathetically at a Starbucks.
Her friends giggled. I could go to a club, but I’d rather not do it alone, and I wasn’t the type to make friends just so I could party. I closed my screen, threw the bag around my waist and slipped out the door, drifting mindlessly into the communal trance. I called a cab for the ride to my hostel to avoid the paranoia of dark streets. Under my bed I found my suitcase, intact, and above my bed I found a British woman, a fellow first-time solo traveler. Her name was Lucy. We both slept peacefully, and in the morning I went out alone again.