the vaccine: new york
a travel letter sent to my patrons
dear friends,
the day I got the first dose of the vaccine, I danced tango for the first time in over a year at a private house milonga — with a bandaid on my increasingly-sore arm - which felt like a one day tattoo to mark an entire era, a singular moment in history.
the next morning, I woke up with full body aches and a total fatigue. I thought it was from dancing. but by noon, I was horizontal — feverish and nauseous, with a splitting headache in the shape of a reverse flower crown. I drifted through the days in a deep head fog, uncertain if it was caused by the tension of new york city air, reverse culture shock after being abroad for over a year, the aggressive way in which I left berlin, too much sudden socialization in proper english, or having just been injected with the fastest developed vaccine in history for a mysterious and unknowable disease.
the day before I left berlin, when I told a friend I was flying to new york to get vaccinated, she looked at me with eyes of betrayal — like I had stabbed her in the heart — and said, are you sure? if you do it, you will damage your soul. I did not know that a soul depended so much on the body — doesn’t that defeat the point of a soul? — but I remembered her expression a week later, a second before the healthcare worker punctured my arm, while I sat on a plastic white chair at a vaccination center in long island city, wafting in the smell of antiseptics against a humming, bustling energy. I looked up at forty booths of people giving and receiving vaccinations at the same time, and thought about how there was no going back now. I wondered how the future would look back on us in fifty years. now my body, too, will carry this history.
the process of getting vaccinated in new york city felt nothing short of life-affirming. in ten years of living in new york, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen its people so enthusiastically mobilized — like a cheerful, well oiled machine. it was impossible to wander three steps without volunteers/health care workers in neon vests ushering you over to THIS CHAIR or THAT CHAIR, in carefully measured distances apart, chirping questions and greetings in simple english, waving color-coded paddles for OVER HERE or pointing you to OVER THERE. you could walk into that room without a brain, and you will walk out vaccinated — (provided you can respond to consent questionnaires). the energy was somewhere between that of a trader joe’s and a military operation — the living definition of the word “gung ho.” you feel somewhere in between an honored guest with personal space - and a sheep outnumbered by very proactive shepherds.
a close friend working in healthcare told me she was vaccinated in a mass vaccination center at york college — the kind of place where they vaccinate 3,000 people a day — where hundreds of military men in naval uniform formed an impressive landscape, accompanying her from point A to point B in under X number of seconds — just enough time to offer an upright, American-friendly greeting and crack a witticism or a compliment on her shirt, before depositing her five paces away. she did not articulate this exactly, but the experience seemed to have left her with marvel at the ideal of America — a sense of a unified entity.
I think I felt something similar. after a year and three months of wandering as a foreign stranger in other people’s homelands — not knowing the country, not understanding the culture, not speaking the language — I left a berlin frozen in winter lockdown to this America, this new york city - at the soft beginning of spring, to a slow sense of opening. a collective exhale of relief. I walked across bridges under blue skies and traffic, wandered aimless through familiar streets with a feeling of sudden fluency. a native-ness. as in: oh, now I’m in new york city. I grew up in this country. I know how to speak. here, I know how to exist without any act of translation or decoding. I know how to be.
how is it that I feel more a part of new york city now — after a pandemic year away — than I did the last eight years of living in the city? because loneliness and isolation is always relative. a year ago, I left for the unknown void in search of myself — the fluid entity which could still exist while separated from culture, country, language, institution, friendship, family, or love. it was not that I did not want to belong to those things — but that I never felt like I truly did. it took me a pandemic year of embracing extremes of isolation — to find what I craved most: to belong fully to myself, to all the worlds I am a part of, to this one human life I am living.
so now I return to new york to sleep on friends’ couches; I cook them chinese food for lunch and dinner; I exchange friendly American greetings in their building; I wander through oversized grocery stores with too many options; I overhear strangers’ conversations on the streets. and though new york city is massive enough to feel like its own country, a city where I’ve lived at least four different lives in four neighborhoods, I wake up every morning and feel as if I’ve woken up somewhere old and familiar, like being in the home of my own family.
as in: I don’t want to live here. but I cannot not return regularly. when you belong to un-belonging, the places where you didn’t belong start to feel like home. new york city is where I’ve accumulated a long history of loving — people, places, things. and one day, back in an unknown foreign land where I know no one again, this history is what my heart will still remember. this is what my body will carry.
support my work and read more writing as a patron.