📖leavers - lisa ko
📍dumbo, brooklyn
Hi, and welcome to my blog which I'm writing in Brooklyn on a Saturday evening.
I planned to leave Manhattan on July 27th on a short one hour plane ride to Montreal, away from the summer rain that made subway rides more hell-ish than usual. But of course, because Mercury was in retrograde what was supposed to be Montreal ended up being Jess' living room, where I turned up at 12AM that night.
I planned to write letters to Leslie--we would orchestrate a site along with other grand schemes we concocted over a spontaneous Rich Table dinner. We'd call it 8 hours apart because that was the time difference between Nairobi and New York City, and we'd talk about how different these places were from the 626, where we both grew up, or San Francisco where we met. I wrote one letter and shortly forgot about it.
At 23, nothing ever goes as planned I guess.
Now I'm here, in DUMBO, my home in between homes. Overlooking an Instagram hotspot and so close to the bridge that I mix up the sound of my airconditioning turning on and the trains running across East River. Today marks month 2 of being in New York.
Things That Haven't Changed:
- I'm still restless and aggressively trying to convince friends from around the world to take trips around the world with me
- I still don't call my parents enough
- I still cry while reading books about the immigrant experience in public places
- I still walk really slow
- When I walk north and see the Empire State Building, I still stop and try to take a picture of it
- I can no longer stand walking for more than 15 minutes to get ANYWHERE, when I used to consider 30 minute bus rides a thing of convenience.
- I no longer find New York's humidity unbearable
- I don't like eating avocados, because the New York avocados just aren't as good as the California ones
So this is an attempt to document me. Me in New York, the city of my adolescent dreams (I think if you told 12 year old me that I'd be living in New York, she would cry), what changes and what stays the same. In addition, I'll post pictures of what I spend money on, the books I read and love or hate, and gossip about everyone I know. Hopefully this goes as plan.
