Dear New Haven,
I’m sorry I didn’t love you.
I’m sorry for the way I complained about the busker playing saxophone on Chapel Street
about summers that feel like being covered in someone else’s sweat
about winters that aren't even snowy, they’re just cold and slushy.
I’m sorry for the way that I shrug when people ask me,
“So, you’re still living in New Haven?”
because I really do love my job
but I’m always daydreaming about the places where people write country songs.
I’m sorry for all the times I rolled out of bed to slam my windows shut, cursing your caged and restless men for ripping through the streets, shredding the silence with dirt bikes and race cars, using their songs and their speed to gnaw space for themselves in the night. I never asked what it was they were running from, what damp dark thing it was that they were always raging against.
I’m sorry that I walk past the piles of trash on your streets, ignoring the coffee cups and condom wrappers and cigarette butts as if they grew overnight like mushrooms. I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that everyone treats you like a landfill, or the fact that none of us seem to mind living in one.
New Haven, I’m sorry that I don’t even smile at your kids anymore. In the mornings I walk past the elementary schoolers waiting for the bus with their oversized backpacks. In the afternoons I step over their little bikes, left in the middle of the sidewalks with wheels still spinning.
I used to smile at strangers but at some point in the last five years I received enough cold stares to learn, This is New England. I began to walk to the beat of the mantra I still whisper to myself: head straight, eyes down, face frozen. Don’t smile.
And now I’ve become as impenetrable as the glass lobbies of skyscrapers and the stony cliffs of the Catskills. Even when I see children, or someone tells me to have a nice day, or an old woman says something sweet—I just stare blankly. It takes me a few blocks to realize what happened, and my heart breaks because now I’m the one too icy to receive a stranger’s kindness.
I giggle that I’m just not a city girl. I can’t parallel park, and I see more people on the way to work than I grew up seeing in an entire day. When I first moved to New Haven I was so wide-eyed and naive that I didn’t know cities came in different sizes. It took me a few months to realize that they weren’t all Manhattan. In an ironic turn of events, I found myself majoring in City—but all these years later, the city still takes its toll on me.
When I come back to New Haven after a summer at home, I find myself dreading leaving the apartment. A five minute walk is just as hard as a thirty minute walk because the most difficult part is going outside. There’s so many cars and people and sights and sounds and smells and It’s just so overwhelming.
On my day off I hide beneath oversized clothes, listening to white noise on my airpods so I can live in my own silent, untouchable universe and imagine I don’t exist on New Haven’s streets. Dark shades, dad hat, ratty shoes, barefaced. It’s August and I’m sweating beneath all the layers but I don’t want to be Gorgeous, I don’t want to be Pretty Girl, I don’t even want to be here.
Later that week I’m on the phone with my love in Texas, and when I hear myself speaking quick crisp blunt words I don’t even recognize myself. I wonder how long it’s been since he heard the voice that first said I love you, slow n smooth n rollin like corn country, too gen’rous n unbothered to be keepin track a syllables n all that.
New Haven hardens me into a person I don’t want to be.
But New Haven, you didn’t want to be this way either.
I whine that everything is so chaotic and close together here, that the city is so loud I can’t breathe—but New Haven, I think that sometimes you just stare down at the sidewalks too. I think you’re also singing to yourself because the streets are beyond what either of us can process.
In 1638 settlers traced a nine-square grid onto your gentle and untamed land, telling you it didn’t matter where your people roamed—you had roads now.
By 1811, you were a vibrant seafaring village but the traders said your shorelines weren’t enough. They told you to grow up, toughen up, try harder—and they burdened you with the longest wharf in the United States.
Again and again people silenced you beneath streetcars and railroads and factories, told you it didn’t matter what you or your people wanted. Traffic just needed to get where it was going.
In 1959, the highway slashed through your neighborhoods, sending 881 families wandering through the chaos—and all the construction downtown proves you’re still trying to heal that scar.
Every city was once raw unscripted land, and sometimes I wonder if beneath the sidewalks—beneath the asphalt—beneath the weight of buildings and cars and institutions and governments—you are hurt and burdened earth, just trying to catch your breath. Innocent and unready land, struggling to fill your lungs beneath the expectations we built on top of you. New Haven, you’re confused and overwhelmed too. You’re sweating beneath all these layers, wishing you could just be free. These streets tore apart your natural beauty and screeched through your pleasant neighborhoods and I wonder if you want to run far, far away even more than I do.
I act as if you’re crazy and brutal, as if living with you is a feat of endurance—but it’s because I’ve only known you as the broken, angry version of yourself that humanity forced you to become.
And despite all the things I said about you and all the pain you carry, I realize now that you have always been kind enough to love me. You held me while I grew up, and I learned the rhythms of your traffic the way I learned my mother’s heartbeat.
You took care of me while I learned what a city was and how I fit into one. You taught me how to use a crosswalk and pay an electric bill. You gave me my first real adult job. You watched me become myself.
So I still want to live in a world that feels as big and comfy as t-shirts that cover my shorts. I want to walk wherever i wanna walk at any time a day or night. i wanna have both airpods in listenin to zach bryin n morgin wallin n thinkin about pickup trucks, completely at ease in my own heartfelt heartbroken sunset Silverado world.
But New Haven, I want to learn to love you the way you have always loved me: selflessly and boldly, no matter how much you’ve been hurt. I want to love you enough to forgive you. I want to love you and your people more than I love my own comfort. I want to love the little kids who live behind us, who begin screaming and giggling as soon as their dad comes home. I want to love the family on the corner, who are always playing loud music and laughing with their front door left open. I want to love the homeless people slumped against brick walls instead of hoping they don’t look at me or try to talk to me, because when you love someone you love all parts of them—and, dear New Haven, I want to love everyone else you love enough to hold in your arms.
New Haven, I know your streets well enough to build them in my dreams. I know your neighborhoods and high schools and coffee shops the way I know my best friends. I’ve spent my entire adult life laughing and crying and dancing with you—and after all these years, I’ve realized: you are my city, and I love you.