After the City

In 2001, I left New York City, the place I was born and raised, the only place I had ever lived. My neighborhood had grown dangerous; hustlers worked the corners and the rhythms of the street shifted in ways I no longer understood. I had been mugged twice in the span of a year. The second time, I handed over my wallet before the man even asked. It was clear to me that something had ended.

I did not leave with a plan so much as a direction. A friend spoke of New Mexico, of space, of sky, of a different way of living. I followed.

The city I found myself to live in was no city at all.

Leslie picked me up in Taos and drove me out to Arroyo Seco. The road narrowed, the pavement gave way, and we arrived at a cinder block shack set into the earth. There was no insulation. In winter, the water froze in the pipes, and we carried buckets from a nearby spigot, breaking ice when necessary. At night, the cold pressed in from all sides. I learned quickly that comfort was a habit, not a guarantee.

Days unfolded differently there. Without the constant hum of traffic and urgency, time widened. Tasks took on a different weight: gathering wood, tending to fire, hauling water, preparing food. Each action was necessary. Each action registered.

There were hot springs scattered through the hills, known mostly to locals and those willing to ask quietly. We would hike out to them, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, following faint trails that slipped in and out of visibility. The air would cool as we approached water, the ground softening underfoot.

Steam rising.

You would undress without ceremony, fold your clothes onto a rock, and slide into the pool. The first contact was always a shock—the body unsure whether to resist or yield. Then, gradually, something released. Muscles unclenched. Breath deepened.

People spoke, or didn’t. Conversations drifted in and out. There was no performance, no need to impress. Bodies were simply bodies, present in heat and mineral water. The usual boundaries softened. Not dissolved—just less rigid, less defended.

At night, the sky opened completely. Stars were not distant points but a field, dense and immediate. Lying back in the water, half-submerged, you could feel both contained and exposed, held and unprotected.

It was a different kind of recognition.

No one there knew who I had been in New York. There was no history to perform, no identity to maintain. The markers I had relied on—profession, neighborhood, reputation—fell away without resistance. What remained was simpler, and in some ways more difficult to face.

Who was I, without those structures?

The days did not answer the question so much as make it unavoidable. In the repetition of small tasks, in the silence between conversations, in the long stretches of unstructured time, something began to shift. Not dramatically, not all at once—but steadily.

I began to understand that much of what I had taken to be fixed was anything but.

The cold, the work, the water, the sky—these were not metaphors. They were conditions. And within those conditions, something in me reorganized, not by force, but by exposure.

I had left one life without knowing what I was entering. What I found was not a replacement, but a stripping down.

The city I found was no city.

And in its absence, something else began.