Not for the First Time — Suzey Ingold

For all that we travelled a lot when I was young, holidays were a little less exciting. It was Finland, at best, or shuttling around England to visit relatives, and even then my dad would find himself a quiet corner to pull out a notebook and a pen to disappear into his work.

Maybe that was why our trip to New York was all the more special.

I still remember the conversation that led us to it, more or less. A Mother’s Day lunch at a restaurant that I’m sure shut down years ago now. A smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel. My dad’s cream suit jacket that came out for such, smart occasions. It must have been me that suggested New York, not expecting them to say yes.

“Well, it’s settled then,” I can remember my dad saying, “we’ll go to New York in October.”

I’m sure my mum uttered some variation of, “well, we’ll see”, as she does at the suggestion of anything that goes against the norm. But a promise was a promise, and I would not have let them forget it.

I’ve written more than once about my connection to the city, from that very first trip through visits with friends, to spending two weeks there by myself at the fresh-faced age of nineteen. I wrote about visiting in the early days after the lockdowns and how quiet it was, the bustle of the evening streets turned to an eery silence I had never before associated with such a place.

But something happened in the time that I visited after living in Toronto – suddenly, New York felt just too big, too much, in comparison to the Toronto that I knew so well.

Until it didn’t again.

It started to claw at me as I wandered Manhattan with a friend in the spring. Suddenly, the hectic crush felt welcome, felt fresh where Toronto had begun to feel stagnant – for many reasons. Where life in Toronto now felt like it was just churning over, one day into the next with no change in sight, New York again felt exciting and rejuvenating and full of the life I was seeking out.

I returned just two months later to attend the Tribeca Film Festival – a primarily work-focused trip (although just try and keep me away from the McKittrick, I dare you). As I walked out of a quiet cinema on Monday into the muggy lunchtime heat, laptop over one shoulder and the Empire State Building glinting in the sun a few blocks north, I had to catch myself.

In the sixteen years since I had first arrived in New York, I had gone from lost and wide-eyed on these big streets to walking around as if I had done so every moment of my life. I had gone from flailing tourist to someone who immediately got asked by the border guards if I was here on business.

I wondered what nineteen year old me would say, if she’d have known. I sat in Union Square later that afternoon, thunder clouds gathering overhead and a crisp wind blowing through west to east. On one corner sat the building I had studied in that summer – now, closed up, its entrance turned into a chain restaurant.

The city has changed in those ten years. I have changed in those ten years. But something that hasn’t changed is how the city makes me feel.

After many months of feeling lost in my creative work, of having no time to so much as consider it, being immersed in a place that is bursting at the seams with art, to be talking with filmmakers every day, I longed to get back to it. I felt that itch of knowing that the thing I ought to be doing was the thing I was not, because I was so caught up in day-to-day. Of trying to pay ever-rising Toronto prices. Of never thinking about what comes next because I hadn’t the energy left to even contemplate it.

Late Monday night, I sat under the dim lights of the Manderley Bar, lost to a world that always feels like another time. Places like that are few and far between, where you can truly disappear from the everyday world, where nothing matters but the present moment.

But creating has always felt like that. Writing has always felt like that to me. And I haven’t been doing it.

There, as I finished the last sip of my cocktail and slipped out into the dark Manhattan night, I made a promise to myself. It was time to stop just existing, and to get back to the person I am supposed to be.

My professional career, the one that took me to Tribeca, the one that has built me into this industry, has created a path for me that I could have never have found alone. But there’s a branching path that goes to a place that takes the two parts of myself hand-in-hand.

That’s the path I’m taking next. It’s going to take a little time and a lot of luck. I may end up in one place, or another. But wherever I end up, I will do it with a pen in hand and a battered notebook under one arm.

Not for the first time, New York reminded me of everything I am – and everything I have yet to be.