Now within 2.4 days of living in New York I had already discovered that buses terrified me and that every form of a cab was out of my budget. So the subway it was. I pulled out my giant map of the NYC Metro system and was determined to memorize every train and every stop. I was determined to be a pro in another week.
Totally easy.
My roommate at the time, let's call her Green, liked to give me advice about New York. Green will be a story for another day, but I can say right now that she was not the type of person to take advice from. I would have told her that to her face, but I was always afraid she was going to stab me.
"Life is tough here," she told me one day as I had the subway map open on the table, trying to figure out how to get to the Upper East Side. "I cried on the subway all of the time when I first moved here. It's totally normal."
Maybe it was because of Green's profound words - or maybe it was because it was one of our only conversations where I wasn't planning a room escape route - but that advice really resonated with me. I was too tough. Everyone kept telling me that New York was so difficult, that the city could crush you whenever it pleased, and I refused to take this advice. Most of my friends that moved to New York before told me about their experiences crying openly on the subway. "It happens," Shelby told me one night. "One day something just breaks you and you're crying on the L train." No. I would not cry - and I would NOT cry on the subway. I was determined to be a hardened New Yorker.
A few weeks later, I was crying on the E train. I got off at Rockefeller Plaza and cried among the Christmas-at-Halloween decorations while tourists stared at me.
"What's your problem?! You're not a New Yorker unless you've cried on the Subway."
