The longer I’ve lived in the same city, the more nostalgia trapdoors I unpredictably fall through when just going about life. Dropping into my past lives by wandering past restaurants, catching the right view down the right street, or just a slight breeze at the right time, the way the leaves move against the sky, triggering a flashback.

They’re typically not cinematic flashbacks to discrete moments. More often, I flash back to the general state of mind I was in when I last encountered those perceptual triggers. I flash back to my habits and worries at the time.

This weekend I saw a close friend who shared my first years together in the city. He was back in town from LA, and walking around the same streets, going to the same restaurants we walked around years ago was almost overwhelming. It was the neighborhood I lived in when I first moved to the city.

Flashbacks to a time with more questions, a wider future, but more freedom. Being in my first apartment in the winter, stressing about my cat getting sicker and sicker. Going over to friends’ apartments in the neighborhood multiple times a week, stressing with them about entry-level job concerns (Were our contracts going to be renewed? Why do projects get killed?) Flashbacks to having the energy to go out every weekend, going to outdoor movies, going on chaotic dates in small, crowded apartments, and feeling like the city was a blank canvas to explore.

In a series of NYT mag articles I read this weekend titled "To See it all anew", 3 writers visit locations they first encountered years before, in different lives. They visit and reflect on remote, undomestic destinations — a mountain outside Lucerne, the Grand Canyon, Istanbul — but living in a city for a while means you collide with the same emotions unpredictably. There's no preparation time, no planning, no stewing over your emotional state on the plane over. It just happens to you.

In the intro to the series, Hanya Yanagihara refers to a Louise Glück line: "We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory." This is roughly how I feel about my first years in the city.

It's a strange cousin of deja vu; not a vague feeling that I've experienced this before, but a strong pull directly back to the experiences I've known. It's a teleportation, not a hallucination.

I've long suspected I feel emotions in a more concentrated manner through nostalgia than I do in real-time. Maybe time sifts all the small emotional pebbles away until just the core feelings remain, to be summoned again later. What feels like a confusing mess day-to-day ends up being filtered to the purest form as time shakes the small particles away and smoothes over the rough rocks I miss day-to-day.

Preparing to buy an apartment here forces all sorts of long-term questions I haven't had to reckon with before. Will living in a new neighborhood provide a "fresh start", a blank canvas to create new nostalgia trapdoors to fall into a decade from now? Does the inherent promise to stay in NYC written in ink with a purchase contract mean I'll keep accumulating and compounding nostalgia infinitely into the future? Is there a benefit to a fresh start somewhere without these trapdoors, or is the power of localized nostalgia something to invest in, to ground my emotional tie to the city?

I spent 3 months working and traveling earlier this year to cities I hadn’t been to before — New Orleans, Austin, Santa Fe, Taos, Aspen. It was refreshing to experience what life could be like without the trapdoors around every corner. But what emotional developments are afforded by both approaches? I’m not sure I have a clear answer.

ty to Caro for feedback 🙏🏻