“Sexy.”

The faceless man whispered, his voice hot and breathy into my ear. I whipped my head around to find my mystery man, but he had disappeared into the profusion of people swarming the streets around 34th Street-Penn Station in Manhattan.

On the wall to my right lay an image of a model with sinewy curves posed seductively on a billboard — with what appeared to be a fire extinguisher strapped to her bare back. Presumably, to put out the smoldering flames of her rampant sex appeal.

With one word, the faceless man had reduced my worth to that of an inanimate sex object — not unlike the faceless woman on the sign.

Over the years, I’ve heard tales of friends being catcalled by older men while on jogs. Of having their pubescent bodies jeered at in candy stores while they stood beside their fathers. In India. In Russia. In California. In Brooklyn. On the subway platform. Outside their university building. Harassment that extended into physical violence and beyond gender to other attributes like their race, ethnicity, religion and perceived sexual orientation, heaping insult onto multiple identities. There are even more stories on sites like Hollaback! and Stop Street Harassment (SSH), both of which work to raise awareness around the everyday street harassment that women — and men too — face around the world.

SSH released a report last year along with Raliance and the Center on Gender Equity and Health (GEH) regarding a nationwide survey on #MeToo and sexual harassment. The overarching statistic was that a shocking — or perhaps not so shocking — 81 percent of women and 43 percent of men had experienced sexual harassment or assault in their lifetime.

However, what surprised me most wasn’t the results, but the realization that in the wake of this sweeping survey, hardly anyone had called for #MeToo to address street harassment. I’d argue that #MeToo should not only discuss the pervert in the C-Suite, but that it should also expand to address something even more banal: the daily violations many women — and men — in every single country experience every time they walk out the front door: street harassment.

In many ways, #MeToo builds on the momentum that the anti-street harassment movement has galvanized over the past decade. A 2014 viral video entitled “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” — created by Rob Bliss in partnership with Hollaback! — launched an international discussion about the pervasiveness of street harassment, though it also become embroiled in controversy for its depiction of race. Activist and writer Feminista Jones shed light on the specific ways street harassment impacts black women through the platform of #YouOkSis? — which came about in 2014 through a Twitter conversation — imbuing the movement with much-needed intersectionality. And SlutWalk, which began in 2011 on the streets of Toronto and reached a fever pitch after celebrity Amber Rose took up the mantle, provided a worldwide platform for women to exercise their sexual agency and stand up against harassment by taking to the streets.

As Holly Kearl, Founder and Executive Director of SSH, says when I interview her by phone last year, “Why are people acting like this is a new issue when it’s not? Activism is not new. Women have been fighting this for decades.”

There are many possible routes to addressing street harassment within the broader context of sexual harassment and violence. Holding perpetrators accountable through social media; creating apps so individuals can track street harassment; and replicating the efforts of groups like Men Can Stop Rape and the Brooklyn Movement Center’s No Disrespect in community centers, schools and religious institutions across the country are just a few.

But in particular, Kearl suggests there are two concrete ways that we can begin to dismantle the structures upholding toxic masculinity and specifically address street harassment: bystander intervention training and enhanced school curriculum for youth around sexual harassment.

Bystander intervention training refers to instruction provided to individuals to intervene in cases of harassment (sexual or otherwise) involving other people — including strangers. A 2016 study by Public Health England found that “bystander interventions have the potential to engage men, as well as women, positively in ending violence against women.”

Regarding the need for open discussions among young people: the 2018 SSH survey found that of those who had endured sexual harassment and/or assault, more than 50% of women and 40% of men indicated that they had experienced it for the first time by age 17. A public space was the most frequently reported place for a person’s first experience with sexual harassment. In other words: street harassment. And at a shockingly young age.

On these two fronts, there are a few things that every individual can do right now to work towards a solution. Educate yourself on the laws in your state regarding street harassment. Sign up for digital bystander training through organizations such as Hollaback!. Push for your schools and universities, or your children’s schools, to include curriculum on sexual harassment and affirmative consent — “Yes means yes” — like California instituted in 2015. And lastly: ask that such curriculum also include discussions around street harassment. For educators, Hollaback! provides a comprehensive suggested curriculum to facilitate discussions on street harassment. And The New York Times published an article offering lesson plans for teachers around #MeToo and sexual harassment.

It’s time we untangle the messy web of sexual harassment and assault, toxic masculinity and rape culture in our society, starting with the lowest common denominator — street harassment — and leading all the way up to the Harvey Weinsteins of the world.

As the blindfolded guests entered the dining room, they barely managed to stifle their gasps at what unfolded before them. They could not see, but what they could smell was more than enough.

It was as if someone had extracted the magnificence of a single rose petal and amplified the aroma a thousand times. An aroma that dotted the cheeks of the room’s inhabitants like morning dew settling on blades of grass. The odor cast a pleasant pall over the room, permeating every nook and cranny — including the nostrils of its delighted inhabitants.

The smell overpowered some of the party-goers, who sneezed profusely into handkerchiefs that they pulled from purses and breast pockets. But for the most part, the guests lingered in the floral musk, wary faces turning up into smiles as they allowed themselves to be seated at the table by the silent waiters hovering at their sides.

Chairs creaked like floorboards in an old home. Servers leapt around the room, much like ball boys on a tennis court, yet hardly a thump was heard. All the patrons could discern was the clink of bottles against their wine glasses as servers rushed to fill them and their uproarious laughter echoing off the walls.

The food wasn’t half either. The first course served had the gristly texture of some charred meat. Its taste most closely resembled smoked ribs accented with a bevy of unusual spices. Turmeric, maybe? Parsley?

The guests clanked their forks and knives against their plates, scraping up every last morsel. A soporific stupor slowly settled over the crowd. As the evening wore on, they rested their utensils against the fine tablecloth and slumped over in a blissful sleep. All but one of them.

A gentleman at the far end felt something unsettling scurry across his wrist — like a tiny stampede of ants dancing on his flesh. It was the slightest of touches, but just enough to prick him back into consciousness.

The man jumped to his feet, ripping off his blindfold in terror. His fork clattered to the ground with a thud, startling the other guests out of their slumber. A dozen blindfolds fluttered to the ground and high-pitched squeals echoed around the man as he took in the full horror of what lay before him.

Cockroaches with beady eyes strutted across the corners of the table — and the gentleman’s wrist. He jumped to and fro in his attempts to shake off the critter.

Flecks of blood dotted the white tablecloth. A black substance sloshed around in the wine glasses. And although it had the right consistency of wine, the eyeballs sunken to the bottom of the glasses confirmed that this was not quite the 1970 Bordeaux he’d been promised in the deluxe “mystery” meal package.

And at the center lay the main entrée: a scorched human corpse on a silver platter, which servers stabbed and skewered and chopped off parts like a rack of lamb at the butcher’s shop.

For a moment, the man stood, as rigid as mummy with his mouth agape in horror. Then, a woman screeched to his right. He followed the shape of her raised arm from the crook of her elbow to the goosebumps on her forearm all the way to her quivering index finger. He finally understood.

A dozen silver vents perched high up the walls of the room released vapors of bubble-gum pink gas into the room, which pooled into clouds around their heads. The scent which had previously stupefied the man now seemed to throttle him with its stench.

A voice jolted him out of his skin. “May I help you?”

The man slowly turned around. Instead of a dashing young gent for his waiter, he found a living nightmare. The corpse’s skin shriveled like peeling bark on a tree. Maggots drifted in and out of the eye sockets and through the holes of his tattered coattails. An unnatural smile plastered the creature’s face, but no teeth lay in the gaping hole of his mouth.

The man shoved the undead server aside, and barreled toward the door with the drive of an Olympic sprinter. The remaining guests quickly followed suit, tripping over their satin gowns and stubbing the toes of their dress shoes in their haste. The room fell silent. The waiter sighed.

“Aww, man. Lost out on all that fresh meat. Guess we’re stuck with the leftover pickings.”

He tossed his serving tray to the ground and plopped down on the guest’s now-vacant seat. The server sawed off a leg, chewing the appendage with the hearty appetite of a, well, living man. After gnawing at the tender human flesh in the same manner as a dog does with a toy bone — a task made considerably more difficult by his lack of teeth — the creature gestured to one of his fellow workers, who had also taken a seat the table.

“Psst — pass the hot sauce! This one’s a little bland.”

***

The most vivid memory from my first Falun Gong practice session in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park was of falling. Feeling faint, I momentarily went weak in the knees and started drifting backwards.

Fortunately, I landed softly on my rump, no worse for the wear. Henry Bevington, a kindly man in his thirties and one of the volunteer leaders of the Madison Square Park group in the fall of 2016, rushed over to pull me up by the hand. He asked worriedly: “Are you okay?” I stood there in a daze, wondering what the hell just happened.

Strolling up to the practice session earlier that evening, I had glimpsed a group of ten or so practitioners on a sandy patch next to a cobblestone walking path. Eyes closed, they were going through the first of the five techniques with fluid, rehearsed motions, somewhat like in a yoga class. They were suited up with snug gloves and waist-length zipper jackets — warm enough to face the elements but loose so as not to restrict movement.

At the front of the group rested a wooden stand, emblazoned with ‘Falun Dafa’ and bearing informational pamphlets, behind which people tossed their bags. There was also an iPod playing soothing music, soft with the hums of percussive instruments and Chinese words sprinkled here and there.

Henry positioned himself in the first row, but, unlike a yoga teacher, he did not stand apart from the group. Instead, he stood among them. I half expected the session to include mostly older Chinese women, but I was struck by the diversity. There were practitioners from all walks of life, including young millennial women, middle-aged Iranian individuals, and thirty-something white men.

I was hoping some of these members would be able to shed light on why a growing number of non-Chinese were drawn to this eccentric spiritual practice — including myself.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is hard to categorize. According to the People’s Republic of China, it’s a brainwashing cult — a definition that millions of Falun Gong practitioners would roundly dispute. For some, it’s a relaxing set of techniques that you practice on a regular basis, similar to meditation or yoga. For many others, it’s a spiritual movement, a way of life, a sense of community, and a philosophy that shapes the way they view the entire world.

Falun Gong began in the 1990s in China alongside several other ‘energy generating’ practices known as qigong, which arose in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. The movement — a combination of Buddhist and Taoist principles — spread through the teachings of Li Hongzhi, whom many Falun Gong practitioners referred to as the ‘master.’ His teachings were disseminated in the seminal books, Falun Gong and Zhuan Falun. According to scholar Maria Hsia Chang in Falun Gong: End of Days, following Falun Gong’s seemingly overnight popularity, millions of practitioners cropped up all over China, including members of the Chinese Communist Party — much to the chagrin of the party’s leadership.

According to Henry, Wang Yeping, the wife of the Chinese Community Party leader and former president of China, Jiang Zemin, was rumored to have begun practicing Falun Gong.

“Jiang Zemin: extremely jealous, evil guy who took power in one of the most evil ways,” remarked Henry with characteristic fervor as we sat down on a park bench after the session. “Basically, he said: ‘My wife would rather follow the leader of this spiritual practice than follow her husband — the leader of the country.”

Falun Gong, unlike other spiritual movements, was famously non-hierarchical, despite its charismatic founder. The public-facing figures of the movement were not monks but volunteer leaders like Henry. And yet Li Hongzhi was rapidly able to attract countless devout Falun Gong practitioners, a zeal that the Chinese Communist Party had been unable to draw out of citizens through harsh state repression. “The system was fundamentally threatened by Falun Dafa’s free, unorganized nature,” Henry told me as we sat on a park bench after the practice session.

The persecution of Falun Gong — including mass intimidation, torture and execution — led untold numbers of practitioners of the movement to flee the country over the past two decades. Many settled in New York. According to the official Falun Gong website, there are more than twenty local practice groups in the Greater New York City Metro Area.

They began organizing free outdoor practice sessions all around the city by advertising classes online. They welcomed practitioners and newcomers — Chinese and non-Chinese alike. Adherents handed out fliers in public squares and passionately railed against the persecution of Falun Gong.

Over time, their ranks began to grow as numerous Westerners became enamored with their spiritual philosophy — even while traditional religion — particularly Christianity — in U.S and Europe was on the decline. According to a 2015 survey published by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of individuals identifying with the Christian faith dropped from 78.4% to 70.6% between 2007 and 2014. Meanwhile, the share of religiously unaffiliated individuals rose more than six percentage points among survey-takers.

I came to Falun Gong, as many did, by accident. At a human rights conference in college, I met a practitioner who had fled China and came to the United States. We kept in touch, and I organized an event on campus to raise awareness about the group’s persecution. Henry, who believed that there were no coincidences in life, would likely have said this meeting was a part of my predetermined spiritual journey.

I grew up in a Hindu household. While daily prayers were part of my childhood, I wasn’t particularly devout. Yet, I maintained an interest in learning about religious movements, and something about Falun Gong had aroused my attention. With its emphasis on personal spiritual improvement, Falun Gong was devoid of the anachronistic sermons and rituals that I found in most organized religions. When I came to New York as a stressed-out grad student seeking order in my daily life, it seemed like the perfect time to dip a toe into the practice.

As a movement, Falun Gong stressed three core principles: Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance (Zhen-Shan-Ren). These principles guided practitioners as they strove to become better people. And it emphasized five techniques — physical routines that were a combination of stretching, body movement, and meditation. These techniques, when practiced in tandem with the movement’s teachings, could enable a person to gradually “cultivate” or reach his or her full potential for enlightenment.

Back at the session, an older black man in a red scarf joined the group at the same time I did, nodding towards Henry. I walked over, not wanting to disrupt him, but Henry sensed my presence nonetheless. He serenely opened his eyes and greeted me in his jolly Australian accent. It was the job of each group practice organizer to instruct newcomers, and Henry did just that, patiently correcting me each time I screwed up.

Uncannily, he seemed to predict each of my questions just as I was about to speak. Henry joked afterward: “Don’t worry, I can’t read your mind. However, I do know people who can.”

As I soon found out, the link between supernatural abilities and practicing Falun Gong was a hot topic of discussion. Li Hongzhi disapproved of individuals who joined to acquire telepathy or cure cancer, stating that the real purpose of the practice was to rid oneself of worldly attachments — including a desire for great power or good health

As he wrote in Zhuan Falun: “Out in the ordinary world, people fight each other, they deceive each other and they harm other people just to benefit themselves a little. The thoughts behind that all have to go.”

Within each technique, you move seamlessly from one position to the next. At least, ideally — I imagined that I resembled something closer to a chicken jerking around in a frenzy. And yet, I felt no shame. You had to check your pretenses at the door. There was no room — and no reason, really — for self-consciousness here. Countless passersby stared and gawked, but no one in the group even blinked an eye. I glanced around, and despite the intensity of some of the postures, members seemed calm — as if a trance had fallen over everyone.

My fainting spell had struck during the first of the five techniques. Feet planted shoulder width apart while facing forward, we moved our hands up as far as they could go towards the heavens. Henry attributed my abrupt weakness to a cleansing of negative energies from my body. I was more inclined to believe it was a combination of dehydration and exhaustion, but I stopped for a minute. Was he right?

After the session, David Gee, the older black practitioner wearing a red scarf, hunched over to release a deep, hacking cough. He grumbled wearily: “I’m going through a bit of karma.”

Karma refers to an accumulation of bad, dark energy — the result of negative actions in our past lives and in the present — in the body. It often presents in the form of misfortune or ailments that practitioners must overcome as part of their Falun Gong cultivation.

Virtue — positive, white energy — is the opposite of karma. It accumulates as people endure suffering, cultivate to higher levels of enlightenment, and live in accordance with the three principles. It’s helpful to think of karma and virtue as yin and yang. Yin and yang comprise part of the Falun Dafa logo, along with the Law Wheel — a symbol of the movement that represents the universe in miniature form. Although non-practitioners often confuse the Law Wheel with the swastika of Nazi Germany, it actually derives from an ancient icon used in many religions, including Buddhism.

David, a native New Yorker, recounted how he found Falun Gong along with his wife, who was also spiritually inclined and “always searching for something.” Of his own background, David recalled: “My mother was a retired Catholic. But there was always this evidence of spirituality beneath everything.” So when someone handed them a flyer about Falun Gong, they decided to give it a go.

He was initially skeptical. But David and his wife stuck with it, convinced by what they read in Zhuan Falun. They became regular attendees of a group in Flushing, Queens. Some years later, they moved to France, and when the relationship floundered, David moved back to New York alone. David was struggling to find full-time work and homeless — the latter I did not realize until Henry gently told me.

David said matter-of-factly: “If I wasn’t a practitioner right now…I’d be like these guys I see on the streets. They’re all sitting there talking to themselves. Their minds are gone.”

“When you’re going through these tribulations, you know, you have everyday people around you who might be feeling bad for you. I’m sitting there in my mind going: ‘Yeah, but it’s okay.’ When you know the principles of the world, you know exactly how to get out of these things.”

I learned in this conversation that Falun Gong often distinguished between “ordinary” people — non-practitioners — and Falun Gong adherents. The idea seemed patronizing, but I got used to it after a while.

Reading Zhuan Falun, which contained the main tenets of Falun Gong in the form of nine lectures from Li Hongzhi, changed the way practitioners like David looked at the world. The book explained the spiritual laws and history dictating a human being’s role in the universe, and also offered guidance for Falun Gong believers in how to maintain faith in the practice.

Henry made it clear that each practitioner’s interpretation of Zhuan Falun was just that — his interpretation only. To really understand, I’d have to read it for myself.

He said: “It’s a little rabbit hole-ish.” “Like Alice,” added David. We all got a good chuckle out of that. So I was Alice descending down the rabbit hole. But was I prepared for what I was getting myself into?

I realized four sentences in that I was in way over my head.

When I finally worked up the nerve to skim the 400-page Zhuan Falun, hoping to see what the other practitioners found so illuminating, I learned that the vast tome included everything from discussions of universes within particles as tiny as grains of sand to putdowns of Darwinism to explanations of the invisible Third Eye that all humans possess — and which practitioners gradually open up as they enlighten.

The fact that Falun Gong was a millenarian movement — one that predicted the coming fall of mankind — was the least of my concerns after reading more in earnest and seeing some of the other conclusions Li Hongzhi drew in the text. These conclusions included: outdated notions of gender and sexuality, a holier- than-thou sense of morality which belied the practice’s otherwise tolerant principles, and an unconvincing melding of pseudo-science with spiritual guidelines.

So I called up Henry — who was quickly becoming somewhat of a Falun Gong mentor to me — to make sense of what I had read. Over tea and hot chocolate at a local cafe, we jumped right into a fervid discussion.

Henry hadn’t exactly grown up a religious devotee. His mother had been “burned” by Catholicism, and he was raised with a rejection of religion. When a practitioner at his first practice site in Australia asked Henry if he wanted to explore Zhuan Falun, he responded, “No. I don’t want to read your doctrines!”

But he was always curious about spirituality and the concept of truth. That inquisitiveness and desire to know only grew stronger as he entered adolescence.

“That was my whole shtick — to be a whole man, to be a true being. To be truthful, to tell out the truth, to find the truth. Funnily enough, I became a journalist,” said Henry. Henry says that as he practiced, he acquired greater compassion and tolerance for others — the other two pillars of Falun Gong.

But looking back on his first interaction with Zhuan Falun, he was hardly persuaded to jump headfirst into the movement. He chafed at Li Hongzhi’s harsh moral prescriptions: “I basically was indoctrinated with too much of one kind of thinking to be able to accept the pretty far-out ideas in the book, right?”

“But the second time I read it, I was totally calm. The same words, the same book. Nothing changed except the way I was reading it. I realized it was my inner monologue. I was being challenged by myself. I was enlightening to new principles in the same words.”

Other practitioners echoed that experience. Upon further readings, Zhuan Falun, a text which was at first obtuse, became clear — like a settling of previously turbulent waters.

Yet, no matter how many times I re-read the book, there were certain things I couldn’t wrap my mind around. How could an adult that believed in concepts like evolution and physics readily accept Li Hongzhi’s blending of science with religion? In one of the book’s more bizarre conceits, Li Hongzhi dove into an explanation of “atoms, protons, nuclei, electrons, quarks” and even “neutrinos” to justify how the human body was actually a small universe unto itself.

However, in Henry’s interpretation, the book neatly bridged the gap between science and religion, so there was no discrepancy between the two.

Even more than the pseudo-science, I was troubled by Li Hongzhi’s rigid moral code — particularly his insistence on traditional gender roles for women and his shunning of homosexual behavior. For a movement that gained traction among people of all ages, these kinds of teachings seemed rather regressive. They were out of touch with millennial youth who marched for LGBT rights and women who openly demonstrated their support for Planned Parenthood. Moreover: weren’t they in conflict with one of Falun Gong’s core principles — compassion?

Henry clearly approached the text from a different lens. “He’s not saying the person who has that vice or does that activity is a bad person. If you stop smoking, your body will get better. If you stop misusing your body in this way, your health will get better.”

But where did Li Hongzhi get off in regulating morality in such black-and-white terms? This is right, that is wrong. Wasn’t there room for a little gray in his world of black-and-white?

Henry smiled and pointing to my sweater, said: “Your top is gray, right? If you zoom in, you might find it’s black-white, black-white in more detail, but you haven’t zoomed in enough…when you zoom in, you’ll be able to figure out the absolute truth of everything that ever existed. Ever. But you have to have the patience, the tolerance to find out the truth.”

Disquieted, I struggled to compose my thoughts. I felt that we had reached an impasse — one that I could not cross, no matter how much Falun Gong compelled me.

I admitted to Henry that the three overarching principles of Falun Gong — Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance — were outstanding moral guidelines. If all human beings lived by these values, the world would probably be a better place.

But when Li Hongzhi assumed the role of pseudo-historian-scientist-philosopher, he lost me — and I suspect many others who tried to immerse themselves into the movement. But for others like Henry, their belief had only grown in the face of the challenges that Falun Gong posed.

Not long afterwards, I thought of David, who had cycled through different movements until he found Falun Gong. And of Henry, who had scorned religion but came to fully embrace it in Falun Gong. For some, seeking out Falun Gong was a stepping stone in an intentional spiritual journey. But for many others, it appeared that a simple stroke of fate led them to the movement.

As for me: I thought about returning back to the Madison Square Park group. But now, I felt like an outsider looking in at the group. It wasn’t possible for me to return back to the wide-eyed, fledgling practitioner that I once was, and I wasn’t sure if I cared enough to bridge the divide between my interest in the practice and my concerns with its more aberrant ideas.

Gradually, thoughts of Falun Gong fell from my mind, and I sought solace from the troubles of everyday life in less spiritual and more human pleasures: turning the pages of a new book, indulging in the fabricated romance of The Bachelorette, and enjoying summertime hikes.

But to say that Falun Gong left no impact on me would be inaccurate. I wondered about David, whom I hadn’t seen again after that first session, but who had nevertheless left an indelible mark upon my memory. I wondered whether I was living up to Falun Gong’s moral precepts in my everyday conduct towards strangers, neighbors, friends and family. And, most importantly, I wondered why it was that that I had shut down when faced with the more challenging aspects of the faith, instead of doing the hard work of reckoning my pre-existing beliefs with the tenets of the movement — as all who are truly pious must do?

Perhaps, I reasoned, I still could not fully comprehend the concept of faith. That true belief was, in some sense, an act of letting go. My body had let go when I fell to the ground in that first session, but my mind, it seemed, would not yield.

Still, I left open the possibility of returning to Falun Gong if it beckoned me back. My spiritual journey, I decided, was not necessarily over.

And if that day came, I would reckon with it then.

Just not today.

July 23, 2018 — Some spontaneous thought poetry. Enjoy! Or don’t. Either way, thank you for reading.

In 2018.

What does it mean
For something to live
Only inside your own head
Instead of on the page, in the
Words of your tweet, in the
Contours of your Snapchat, in the
Filters of your Instagram, even in the
Words of others?

What does it take away from you
For it to exist only inside of you?

In 2018.

Children splashing around in the cast-off water from an open fire hydrant in Harlem on a ninety-degree day

While police sirens buzz in the background like mosquitoes in summer heat

Hipsters in Williamsburg waltzing by bodegas with signs advertising the finest craft beer

While a man on the street corner begs for a fuckin’ dollar from anyone, just about anyone

Nature lovers descending on the Bronx Zoo to ooh and ahh over langurs and grizzly bears and pet goats, tightly clutching their children’s hands

While other children in a shelter not far away, but far enough from the southern border where they last saw their parents, cry out in pain

Couples hosing each other down with sunscreen and snapping selfies with mermaids in blue fishnet stockings on Coney Island’s Riegelmann Boardwalk

While a mob stabs a teenage there in the back just two days later

Old and young Puerto Rican men slamming dominoes on Loisaida Avenue, enjoying a ritual that’s lasted through the generations

While up the block, a shiny 27,000 square foot Target displaces one of the last Chinese places in the Village where you could get a $6 chicken fried rice

— -

The city teems with life

Even while it decays.

While I was ordering basil fried rice — my go-to meal — one evening at a Thai restaurant in the East Village, the server hemmed and hawed. “Umm. We don’t have that as a summer special.”

“It’s on the menu,” I responded, more bluntly than I needed to, without couching my refrain in the umms, pleases, sorrys, and excuse mes of a typical Californian. The server frantically apologized and scurried off to place my order. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I admitted that I was becoming somewhat of a New Yorker after all.

***

Moving to New York for grad school ought to have been a homecoming. Before being whisked away to Connecticut, Tennessee and then California at the age of four, I was born in a hospital in Mount Vernon, New York — a mere twenty miles outside of Manhattan. Yet it never felt that way.

Joan Didion said much in Goodbye to All That, her infamous farewell to New York. But one line stood out: “I was in love with the city the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.” I understood the feeling.

California — specifically the San Francisco Bay Area — was my first love. The place where sunshine and drought and overly friendly people and rolling green hills and superb Mexican food thrived. The place where my heart thrummed every time the plane descended into San Francisco International Airport. The place where I called home.

New York, rather, was an arranged marriage. Being myself the product of such a union between my Indian parents, I was not disposed to welcome it. I didn’t take much stock in horoscopes, but as a Cancer, I was a born romantic. I wanted the kind of cosmic, all-consuming love that you’d find in a song by Florence and the Machine.

Instead, what I got from New York was gradual affection — not yet love, not yet home, but maybe, someday — arising from a mutual contract of fidelity to one another.

There were lonely nights, Netflix and Chill, and hour-long subway rides to uncertain destinations. I figured out the maze of J, Q, M, 2, 3, L, 4, 5, 7 (and the 7 express — only 5:30–9 pm to Queens on weekdays), Marcy Avenue, Bedford Avenue, the chaotic mess of Union Square, still never failing to ride the train uptown when I was going downtown, but never ceasing to be amazed at the crazy-ass places where I ended up, like an austere monastery north of Washington Heights or a wonderful concoction of bubble milk tea shops and 99 cent stores in Flushing.

Some things — like taking a deep breath to inhale clean air and instead choking on the scent of urine and cigarette butts — would be borne as a routine part of the relationship. Though never quite forgiven.

Other days, I would wander up and down First Avenue, feeling that I could walk to the ends of the Earth just trying to stave off the gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Loneliness.

***

Not long after my arrival, a trio of college students wandered into the Thai restaurant. And as anyone would do when there was an entire restaurant of empty tables, the group took a seat right next to me. I cursed what should have been a pleasantly quiet evening, already preparing for a deluge of shrieks and recollections of weekend keg parties.

The group was made up of two young women — one blonde, one brunette — and a dark-haired man. The man wore blue pants, spotted with what seemed to be paint stains — or perhaps he bought them like that.

I stirred the orange dregs of my Thai iced tea with a straw and picked at my fried rice. The cooking wasn’t up to restaurant’s usual standards. The chicken wilted on my fork. I combed through the pages of Stephen King’s On Writing with my other hand.

I came upon a passage where he described how a doctor jabbed a needle into his eardrum, allowing the pus to flow onto a pillow while a young Stephen screeched in pain. I immediately regretted my choice of dinner reading. But a voice soon jolted me out of the page.

“She didn’t give me the courtesy of letting me know…I mean her mom and brother were there. I was pulling my pants up, and I was wearing a thong.”

Eyebrows raised, I lowered my copy of On Writing and looked on to the college group. The brunette woman was talking up a storm about her crazy roommate with apparent boundary issues. She spoke with vigorous gusto. Her friends laughed in the way that people do when presented with a funny party anecdote and you are expected to laugh.

The server brought out their meals. They nibbled for a bit in silence, but the dark-haired woman was on a roll.

“Most Thai places don’t give you spice on the side. This dish isn’t spicy at all,” she complained. Her male friend nodded in assent. She continued: “I was at Lotus the other day, and I said I wanted three stars. The woman was like, ‘no, two stars for you.’ She laughs. “That’s probably fair.”

Fork suspended in mid-air, I listened on. It wasn’t until afterwards, when I was walking home, shivering as the wind nipped at my throat and the to-go box containing the scraps of my dinner thumped against my thigh, that I realized why I had been so drawn to this seemingly banal conversation. Here I was, sitting alone on a Saturday night in the greatest city on the planet, feeling like a total failure, when in walked these college studs, beaming with youth, exuberance and a hint of arrogance. Everything that I lacked.

It was that word again. Loneliness.

I yearned for the camaraderie, the fuck-it-all, the ‘life is your oyster’ vibe of my college days at UC Berkeley. Maybe that was what I really missed most about California. When you were nineteen and felt like you could take anything the world could throw at you. When you could be a UN diplomat, a museum curator, a National Geographic photographer. When you had an ample supply of friends who would cheer you on, and maybe, the possibility of a lover not too far off in the distance.

At my ripe old age of twenty-five, with no lovers and fewer friends, I was finding it more difficult to throw caution to the wind — to greet every day with a can-do attitude. I cursed when old Facebook memories popped up on my feed, reminding me of the sunny optimism I once possessed but now lay dormant under a harsh dose of reality.

I had spent a few years wiling away in a nonprofit office — with no window — right after college, trying, but often failing to secure legislative victories for human rights in the partisan environment of Capitol Hill. Failures which had now been supplanted with a weekly onslaught of rejection emails — the bane of a writer’s existence. The natural trajectory of adult life had begun to subdue the winning attitude of the girl from California.

And it wasn’t just the professional malaise. When I moved first from Berkeley to Washington, DC and then finally to New York, I felt like each time, I left behind a piece of my heart in friendships that distance could not overcome.

While I stewed in this sort of quarter-life, existential crisis over my pathetic meal, the blonde college co-ed talked about her friend who racked up a hefty tab at some other restaurant and refused to pay. I didn’t even know restaurant tabs were still a thing; I thought that was called dine-and-dash.

After a few more minutes of banter, the chatty brunette threw out this final bombshell: “When I was six, my dad gave me a purity ring. He told me to give it to my husband on my wedding night — ” Her blonde-haired friend across the table visibly gagged, though that could have been due just as much to the quality of food as to the antiquated notion of sexual chastity —

“ — and said if I had any questions, to call him.” “Yeah, Dad, I’m going to call you on my wedding night.” I imagined that her sarcastic jab was accompanied by the usual eye-roll of a young person when their parent said something incredibly foolish.

Finally, I cracked a smile. I set the book down. I discarded my meal in favor of unrepentant eavesdropping.

The gnawing feeling in my stomach had been sated. Mere proximity to close friendship and the unfettered optimism of youth was, for the time being, good enough for me.

This was as good as lonely Saturday nights got in New York City.

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Tara Yarlagadda is a freelance print and multimedia reporter based in New York (originally from the rolling hills of the San Francisco Bay Area). Her beats include human rights, politics, media, tech, food, film/TV, books, and the environment. She is also an avid photographer and aspiring screenwriter. Her work has been published in sites like Paste and The New Food Economy, and in outlets like The New York Times 360 and PBS NewsHour. For more of her professional and personal writing, visit tarayarlagadda.com.