The Casual Crush of Inevitability
New York always has been, and always will be, a small town.
I learned this fairly quickly after moving here, years ago.
In a city of 8.38 million people, there is an air of inevitability that could threaten to crush you in unrelenting waves were it to exist in any other town. In New York, that same inevitability is relegated to a casual wave, humming alongside the undercurrent of the subway beneath your feet.
You could turn a corner and run into friends, lovers, ex-lovers, long estranged family members, one-night stands, or your sworn nemesis. A chance meeting with a childhood friend on the platform of the E train might make you late for an interview. Exiting the fitting room at a boutique, laden with collared shirts, leaves you liable to running into the very person you cancelled plans with a week ago. Trying to impress your dinner date at your favorite West Village haunt is akin to begging fate to intervene and send your ex to grace the table next to yours.
I was once walking down 23rd street, headed towards 1st avenue, when I had such a chance meeting. It was Halloween, the streets still littered with people in various states of undress, either by costume choice or by the late hour - 3 am, to be exact. In my memory, the air was thick and sticky, a cold contrast to the chilly Halloweens I endured growing up in Buffalo, my mother insisting I don a puffy jacket before leaving the house to go trick-or-treating, the night often clouding with mist from our breath as we shuffled from one house to the next in search of candy. New York City Halloween was a welcome surprise, the heat lending itself well to the short-shorts, tank top, and tight sweater of my costume. My friends and I were strolling down the street, having polished off mountains of pancakes at our favorite diner to celebrate trouncing a large number of frat boys at beer pong mere hours earlier. The party the frat had thrown had been decidedly lame, but we’d trekked out to the Bronx to go, and so, in a valiant effort to make the best out of a bad situation, we’d thrown ourselves into the singular goal of besting the frat boys at their own game - and had come out the victors.
We were laughing and loping our way down the street when it happened - that sense of casual inevitability rose and rose and rose, chance and fate combining to have it come crashing down over me.
“Anjor! ANJOOOOOOR!”
In a moment, the thick heat of the island turned into fog, the streets into moors, and I felt like I was on the hills and Heathcliff was yelling my name.
I whipped around on the street, turning to my friends to ascertain whether or not this was actually happening - was someone actually yelling my name?
“That’s your name!” Charlotte exclaimed, a brow furrowed. I shared a nervous laugh with my friends and watched as a man in a giant bunny rabbit costume raced over to where we were standing.
The meeting was far less exciting than the story - the giant bunny costume wearer turned out to be a casual acquaintance from high school, someone who had graduated two years after I had, and had heard my name casually bounce across the street as one of my friend’s peals of laughter likely hit a building in echo. He had just moved to New York from Buffalo as well and thought he might come over and say hi.
It was a funny meeting, and though I haven’t seen him since, I think about it often. Fate, chance, trust, and a little pixie dust colluded to make him turn down the right streets and wrong ones, all to hear a name from his not-so-distant past, causing him to hear my name and bounce over to say hi. We exchanged pleasantries and briefly caught up, only to turn and continue with our lives, two lines diverging after meeting.
While I haven’t seen him since, and the possibility of seeing him again might be low, it is never zero.
8.38 million people. The subway moves millions of them, up and down, every single day. Buses, laden with folks, turn corners and trot along. Cars zip determinedly through traffic, cutting each other off. Someone walks down Park Avenue and hears a song that makes them thing of someone from their past. That same person walks up Park Avenue, mere minutes later, hears a similar song, and smiles, thinking of the other person. They could go their whole lives without knowing that they were both there, thinking of the other, mere breaths from reuniting, all while occupying the region of our hearts and minds in which lives the land of fond nostalgia.
A week ago, I drove into work. I’ve made the drive many times, for many reasons; before I used to work in a rather happening part of Brooklyn, I had visited the neighborhood plenty of times, bringing visiting friends and family alike there, showing them around, taking pictures with the Manhattan’s East Side in the background. I knew the drive, I knew it well.
And yet, I took a completely different route into work, Google Maps helpfully directing me to cut through a neighborhood in Brooklyn rather than languishing on the highway.
The casual inevitability rose, rose, and rose, washing over me once again.
I had an inkling as I made one turn onto a street that I knew felt familiar. Something in my gut clenched. My throat tightened. The sense of foreboding worsened as I drove haltingly - the traffic seemed to be worse, despite it being a detour I was ostensibly taking to save time.
Mere weeks ago, I’d driven down this street with the thrum of excitement in my soul, feeling like a live wire. The streets in this neighborhood all proudly sported the names of different towns in New York State, which I took to be an excellent omen. After a lifetime of roadtrips and taking every form of transit imaginable while traveling from Buffalo to New York City, to opposite ends of a state I loved, I knew these towns, I’d passed through them, I carried them within me. Utica, Rochester, Buffalo; on and on they went.
Fast forward a few weeks and there I was, in a different car, driving with a different purpose, edging along traffic and watching morosely as the streets ticked by. I changed the song on my playlist to a sad one and let the tears fall.
In a city where the chances of running into the very person you don’t want to see are slim but never zero, there was something so casually cruel* about being forced to drive down the same streets, knowing exactly which turns will lead to their apartment, and sitting with the knowledge that the last time you were there, the air was filled with promise. The last time you were there, the air was sweeter and filled with the potential of something new, budding like springtime. The last time you left there—and headed to the same destination, ironically enough—you left with hope and wandered around with freshly kissed lips. Lips that were kissed in a sweet and hopeful goodbye, the kind of kiss you give when you know there’s so many more to come.
And there I was, one text heavier and one text lighter, having sluiced off a something I wanted very badly but threatened to be very bad for me, but mourning it all the same.
It was a special kind of haunting—one only New York City could provide—to be forced into the same drive, the same memory, the same place, but with a whole new context behind it. I was half-fearful I’d see the very person I was hoping I wouldn’t see. Blissfully—or, perhaps, regretfully—I didn’t. I cried to Taylor Swift the rest of the way.
In a city of 8.38 million souls, I know I’m not the only one that’s been pricked by this particular feeling, the only one drowned by a wave of casual inevitability. It’s not unique to me, but it feels unique to New York, and I can’t bring myself to be mad at it. I’ve been bruised and burned by it before, and I’m sure I’ll be bruised and burned again. But I’ve been delighted by it, too, and that’s the rub of it, I suppose.
There’s something about the randomness that still inspires a sense of hope in me. In a city of 8.38 million people, with even more coming and going, there’s a sense of magic, of purposeful chaos, when you run into someone you didn’t expect, whether or not it’s welcome. We’re all haunted by the same demons and graced by the same angels, whether it’s driving down streets that inspire tears, men in bunny costumes, or rekindled friendships in coffee shops you just happened to pop into. I came to New York City a staunch realist, disbelieving in fate. I stay here as someone with hope, someone that’s given up to that wild mix of chance and luck, to the statistical probability of running into who you least expect, exactly when you might need to.
If I burn, let me burn. If I bud, let me bud. That’s for the wave of casual inevitability to decide.
*casually cruel is, of course, a turn of phrase popularized by one Miss Taylor Alison Swift
