Coming Undone Terri White (ebook pc reader TXT) 📖

me, a man who should be at home lies down in an empty hotel room, preparing to lie again to his wife. When I get home, I take a long, scalding shower, my tears of disgust and self-pity running into the water.

There isn’t one specific extraordinarily dark moment that compels me to leave New York. There isn’t a third-act epiphany. Though there are moments over the months that follow that are both better and worse. I delete the dating apps, retreat from male touch. I descend back into isolation, sitting in the darkness. When I’m offered a job back in London, the choice is clear: to try to live afresh, anew, or to stay here in my sadness, my silence, harden my edges, straighten out the curves of me to be able to survive in a city that I fear wants to crush me under its weight.

I feel myself start to curdle at New York’s touch. I scream at a truck that nearly ploughs into me, when I don’t have right of way. A woman in a business suit and sculpted hair calls me a ‘cunt’ at 7.30 a.m. for not refilling my subway pass fast enough and I don’t flinch. I’m sharper, shorter, angrier, less patient, more irritated. I always believed that I would shape New York around me: I was incontrovertibly me and this would be the case wherever I lived. Even in a city as brutal and averse to bargaining as New York. But in the end, of all my complicated affairs, my one with New York is in so many respects the most complicated of all.

When the lust, the longing, the belief that I could be reborn there starts to fade – if it has ever truly been there – the city is hard and cruel. It is the boyfriend from the days before you knew better, who’s hotter than you and makes you work your arse off to keep him, suffering a raft of indignities and humiliations along the way. The mornings on your back, the nights on your knees. He might be the love of your life, but you’re certainly not his. In fact, he, it, doesn’t give a fuck.

The moments are still there. The flashes of cinema and poetry. When I’m hurtling along in a yellow cab as the city lights flash by; when I’m watching a movie under the Brooklyn Bridge as the sun dips slowly behind it; when I’m walking through Times Square, all lit up like a Christmas tree, at three a.m. in July; when I’m nursing a beer on a roof while the skyline dances in the distance. Then, for a few seconds, it feels like pure magic. I rub my eyes and blink hard, convinced that when I open them again it will have disappeared. And yet, in these moments, I feel unreal. The city feels unreal. What do you do when life is a series of beautifully crafted moments but those moments aren’t enough to make up a life? And certainly not a life that you can sink back into feeling safe and secure and loved. And enough. It’s certainly not the city to seek refuge in from the bombs dropping in your head. To fill your gaps, your holes, seal the fractures shut.

On the surface, I am not beautiful enough, pretty enough. I am not thin enough for New York. My hair isn’t thick enough. I am not rich enough. My clothes are not expensive enough. But really, it’s that I’m too needy for New York. Too raw, too exposed and brittle.

My final week in the city. I’m on the subway; it’s a normal Wednesday morning. At Eighth Avenue, a woman gets on, homeless and clearly mentally distressed. She’s wearing a dirty vest and jogging bottoms, her hair and eyes wild. She jumps onto the train, shouting as the commuters around her flee up the carriage. As she continues to shout, she starts to tug at her trousers, pulling them down before squatting. We all know in that instant what she’s going to do. The carriage splits: those who roll their eyes and sit further away or get off the train entirely and those who laugh, hard, hands shaking while they line up the camera on their phone to get her shitting on the subway train floor in HD. That the subway cars are populated by the homeless, the mentally ill – who aren’t medicated, don’t even have a doctor or medical insurance – isn’t news in New York. Everyone knows it; no one talks about it. They ignore it, they laugh about it.

It’s part of the schizophrenic stitching of a city that has two faces. The dance parties on street corners just above the trains speeding through mud and rain puddles, carrying the city’s sickest people.

None of this makes it easy to decide to leave the city that everyone tells you will make your dreams manifest. Fear snakes around my guts as the question flashes across my mind: who decides to leave New York? I sit on the kerb near my office, debating whether I should stay or go, and a friend poses the question that cuts through all of the noise.

‘Why do you want to stay?’ he asks.

‘Well, what would people say if I didn’t?’ I shoot back. ‘They’d think I was mad.’ I know even before the words have travelled through the air that this couldn’t, shouldn’t be enough to keep me here.

I want more than an envied life. More than an idea of a life, a dream you’re sold without looking at the small print. I want somewhere to live, something to love, and I want it to be real.

I want to lay the ghosts to rest, bury their human bodies under the soil once more. This time never to be resurrected.

I want to feel something other than pain and oblivion, fear and dread. I don’t want to feel death following me around, the shadow on my back. I want to shake