“We are New Yorkers!”
This was an exercise for a class taught by Karen Russell where we were challenged to use “we” as the perspective. It is a working draft as I’ve received some feedback on it, but I wanted to at least post version one here.
“We are New Yorkers!”
Mina Leazer
“We are New Yorkers!” we yelled as we hooted and hollered at 7pm! Pots clanged, trumpets blared, and we could even hear the faint thrum of David Bowie’s “Heroes.” We sat sequestered in our apartments and thought of our last subway ride when we hunkered down on the seats, afraid of what might be lurking on the poles. We enjoyed deliveries of alcohol as we checked on friends who waited for phone calls from the hospital as they searched for their loved ones. We shifted nervously when our partners coughed and desperately prayed that we would never have to go ourselves.
“We are New Yorkers!” we cried as we cheered and danced at 7pm, and then waited for our delivery order. “No!” we yelled into the intercom that we could not come downstairs. We clicked the button for “leave it at our door!” We wrote bad reviews which we quickly forgot about as we clicked on our televisions to escape. We were glad our groceries were being delivered tomorrow. We barely ventured out and brushed away thoughts of West African immigrants who desperately searched the aisles for “bouillon base” on our behest barely fathoming that an entire village’s worth of chicken soup could fit in an 8oz. jar.
“We are New Yorkers!” we screamed at 7pm as the days grew warmer and we ventured out with our blow up couches having “socially-distanced” picnics that were Instagram-worthy. We threw our heads back and laughed, nudging aside those posts about the pandemic not being over. We pored over people’s ICU stories and thought they were great fodder to show people that we were plugged into the news. Our masks slipped down and the straps of our bikinis slinked to the side so we could soak up more rays because the beaches were closed, and the grass was the next best thing.
“We are New Yorkers!” we clapped from our dining room table because it was rainy and cold that day. We shared stories about the governor and the latest tweet we had heard. We Zoomed with our friends at inappropriate hours because there was only one time to sync up people in three different time zones. We peered into the corners of their screens looking for any commiserate signs of the “suffering” we had to do. It had been 8 weeks of quarantining!
“We are New Yorkers!” we sighed as we dared to click past the button which warned “the following contains graphic imagery which may not be suitable to all viewers.” We were shocked that such things could exist, and we thanked ourselves that we lived in more progressive places. We condemned the South, and we ran 2.23 miles to show that we were “woke.” We quickly lost track of it the next week as the mileage tracker on our Fitbit apps slid over to show the current week’s progress.
“We are New Yorkers!” we clamored again when we thought about the last time we’d been to Minneapolis, a pretty cool town for the Midwest. We clicked again on the blurred out screen, this time with a friend’s warning to mentally prepare ourselves. We gasped and didn’t quite understand what we saw because a soul leaving a body is quite colorless. The next day we couldn’t believe we saw the Target where we had picked up a pair of flip flops last August when the weather had been unseasonably warm, and we forgot to pack our sandals.
“We are New Yorkers!” we affirmed as we stood in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Minneapolis, even as fires burned. We put up pithy quotes from our African-American studies class which we were proud to have taken in college, even though it wasn’t in our major. We made signs and didn’t even notice that we were no longer talking about the same things as the people who marched next to us at the #BlackLivesMatter protest. We took selfies in front of the burned-out police vans to prove that we were there, and we thanked our luck that the lockdown was finally “over.”
“We are New Yorkers!” we wrote on our community boards when the looting hit a little too close to home. We fought back racist comments and put up black squares to show that we were defenders of the cause. We called 911. We made sure to say “people with hoodies” were breaking the glass of the convenience store across the street. We yelled at them from the balcony and told them that this was not the way. We saw that they were kids.
“We are…” We hesitate to say now as we sheepishly look for places to flee to which are far from New York. We used to start our AirBnB introductions with “We are New Yorkers!” but now we consider giving our names instead. We introduce technicalities. We’re not really New Yorkers. We’re actually transplants. Wouldn’t it be more fitting to say we are from the Midwest? Or that we are from the countries we despise saying when people ask us “Where we are really from?” We quietly strip our locations from our public biographies and decide to use our passports instead of our licenses. We treasonously consider applying for other passports because we convince ourselves it’s just paper after all. We can still just quietly know in our hearts that “We are New Yorkers!” can’t we?
