three years in nora ephron's new york

a love letter

this month marks three years since i moved to new york, since my actual, permanent move out of my parents’ house. i’ve spent three years in my little astoria apartment, three years building community with old friends and new, three years prancing around like the lead in the nora ephron movies i’ve worshiped for decades. this month also marks a year-and-a-half with my sweet, wonderful partner, and a year-and-a-half since the first year-and-a-half of my time here ended. as my personal life has stabilized, and i’ve settled into an adulthood where i trust my closest bonds, it’s easy for me to forget that, for the first year-and-a-half i lived in new york, i was functionally a weeping ghost.

i’ve never really gotten into this in public, because it is embarrassing. don’t get me wrong — i’ve alluded, i’ve gestured, and i’ve tweeted through it¹. i’m still not going to get into much gory detail. but: a month after i moved to new york, i experienced a heartbreak that rewrote everything i thought was true about myself, my life, and my relationships. the person who broke my heart was a close friend who’d reappeared in my life for about 48 hours after a year of physical distance and emotional absence. they kissed me for the first time, flew thousands of miles away, and called me from there to tell me we couldn’t be in each other’s lives anymore. i haven’t seen them since The Event, and i haven’t spoken to them in nearly as long.

what i experienced in the aftermath was whiplash that was also grief. it didn’t make any sense, and it was wildly destabilizing. i’d come to the end of a seven-year relationship, and it was a romantic end, but it was not, technically, a breakup². i’d finally experienced physical intimacy (after many years of rejection and, subsequently, many years of fiercely protecting myself from possible rejection) and it was immediately ripped away and replaced with solitary confinement. i was so confused and so hurt. the first time my therapist told me i was grieving, i barely believed her; it took me until a year-and-a-half later, when my uncle died, to fully wrap my head around the fact that i’d actually grieved that relationship. like, oh, now that i’m finally experiencing grief at a time when i’m supposed to, i can acknowledge that grief doesn’t discriminate based on societal expectations for how much you’re supposed to feel at the end of certain relationships. grief is stronger than the shame you might feel for grieving wrong, but my shame put up a good fight.

in my early weeping ghost days, i’d walk around new york city in long sundresses and crocs sandals, listening to the same playlist³ of the same 50 “safe” songs i’d curated to make me cry but not sob in public. i had the “best drugstore waterproof mascaras” tab open on my phone at all times. i’d ~work from home~ while walking around the track at astoria park, answering emails from my phone and ruminating, ruminating, ruminating, obsessing, feeling awful, hating myself. i fancied myself sally albright in those devastating scenes in when harry met sally after she and harry sleep together and before they reconcile, though i did not really expect a reconciliation of my own.

i went to a mike viola concert at bowery ballroom and stood near but didn’t bother a longtime celebrity crush (spring awakening tony winner john gallagher jr.) while i miserably watched the show through the hole between two lovers’ heads and thought about the crepe i was going to eat afterwards. while going to eat that crepe, i walked past katz’s delicatessen, which felt like a stab to the heart and smelled like pastrami. i took myself to the met to cry at the art and was shocked to find myself at the temple of dendur, where harry and sally have the pepper-in-my-paprikash conversation and sally reveals she’s started dating; on the way home, i bought an entire cheesecake. i took some of the most beautiful photos i’ve ever taken of myself near the part of central park where sally, carrie fisher, and their third friend have that conversation over lunch⁴, and immediately afterwards i sent a pleading text i shouldn’t have sent. i kept curling my hair in an approximation of meg ryan’s. i was miserable, but i was here. while processing the end of my own will-they-or-won’t-they, and-then-they-did-but-oh-no, i took comfort in my pop culture landmarks. i’d always thought that being in love in new york was the true nora ephron experience; i was learning that, as long as you’re prone to magical thinking, being heartbroken in new york⁵ is just as ephron.

that year-and-a-half passed so slowly, with so much self-reflection and so much warping self-hatred into a new level of self-understanding. by the second summer i spent in new york, i’d started feeling a little more in-control, a little less sad and grief-stricken. i switched to another “safe” 50-song playlist⁶, one that made me feel better. i stopped monopolizing conversations with everyone i know with “hey, guess what the hell happened to me,” and i went on a bunch of (largely unsuccessful, but definitely instructive) dates. i wrote a play about a mythic situationship and asked a twitter friend to write the music for it.

one day, i asked him to meet me in union square (no specific nora ephron connection, just a convenient midpoint between our homes) to talk about that music, and we ended up sitting there and talking about other things for, like, six hours. the sun set and his eyes were all sparkly and blue and i was like, “oh no.” i was really, really normal about it. the day after we opened the play (because i am ethical and conscious of power dynamics), i sent a lunatic text message asking him out and, to my delight, he said yes.

our first date was to see an amazing karina rykman concert at baby’s all right. afterwards, we spent such a long time walking around williamsburg and ended up down by the water, facing a glittering, evening manhattan. i remember saying, “you know those moments in new york where it’s just new york?” and he was like, “yeah, i do.”

on our second date, we sat outside underneath twinkling lights at macoletta in astoria and i told him about the nazi who interviewed me and he told me i’d have to get used to hearing the word “phish.” after we saw stop making sense in theaters together, we walked down to barclays center and sat on a bench that i can still feel under my legs. we saw casablanca at the IFC center on new year’s day, right by the big fake arc de triomphe in washington square park where harry drops sally off in new york, but most of what i remember from that when harry met sally landmark-heavy day is holding his hand. we’ve spent hours walking through crown heights and astoria, mostly to the deli and to the bagel shop and to the train, and even those mundanities feel like part of a greater love narrative. on new year’s eve in 2023, i showed my roommate (and one of my best friends, who i barely knew before moving here) becky when harry met sally for her first time, basically to put an exclamation point on a decade-long sentence. on new year’s eve in 2024, i kissed jack at midnight at the phish show at madison square garden.

i’m happy to let nora ephron own the landmarks of my heartbreak. i needed those moments of abstracted romance in that first year-and-a-half, to feel myself walking the footsteps of writers and characters i adore for some kind of cosmic, filmic assurance that i’d be okay someday. but while i was falling in love with jack, and spending time making memories with countless friends, new york became mine. landmarks became ours. when i moved here, i loved new york because of what i’d seen. i now love new york because of who i am, and who i’m with.

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thank you for indulging the one time every couple of years where i get personal! i would be remiss if i didn’t mention that i was inspired to write this after reading through the backlog of IRL Haunted Dollhouse by

April Von Blood

. she writes about the aftershocks of heartbreak so beautifully that i finally felt empowered to share something about my own. also, my friend

miyako singer

(who writes the wonderful hoots and hollers) just got engaged at the temple of dendur, so sue me for getting romantic and emo!

also, my play, Two of Hearts, placed first in our program at the Queens Short Play Festival. get tickets to the semifinals here! and i have a piece in Broad Sound about the role of U.S. presidents in musical theatre!

as always, you can support me by subscribing for free or for money. or you can buy my book of plays!

1. "getting kissed for the first time at 24 is like ohhhh so THAT’s why teenagers are insane” — me in a tweet in 2022

2. it’s so confusing to talk about, because people are always like “nobody talks about friendship breakups,” and then they talk about friendship breakups. but i do think it’s true that no one talks about whatever the fuck happened to me. it was both bigger and smaller than a bread box. why are there not fraud books and scam courses about my uniquely devastating set of human experiences, huh?

3. playlist title “oh god”

4. and carrie fisher folds over a card in her rolodex after finding out the card-holder is now married. i love when she does that

5. shout out to Heartburn, the delightful most divorced movie of all time

6. playlist title “oh yeah”