An Unexpected Goodbye — Writing Wrong

I woke up and the sky was clear,

lucid as my one track mind.

I knew the time to leave was near.

There’d be no goodbyes to find.

With panic rising through a quiet midtown

we made our way to the rental car shop.

This new New York on shaky ground

from Fifth to Park at 12 o’clock.

No fuss, no hugs, just one exit ride

and a crumpled up bucket list.

As we passed the GW bridge I sighed,

who’d have thought it would end like this?

Mist, rain, fog played on repeat,

as a sun in hiding chased us west.

Scrolling through photos in the passenger seat,

not really knowing what comes next.

But I know it’s goodbye to the Upper West Side,

to a time and a place, ever defining,

to the roaches, that kitchen, and cramped subway rides,

to the hustle, rooftop nights, and silver linings.

And I know we’ll be back but it won’t be the same.

We’ll be packing up with one job to do,

chased by the sun to face life’s next game,

just passing through a city we once knew.

Context: Blake and I were living in Manhattan until March of this year. When the Covid-19 pandemic really started to escalate we joined so many other young adult New Yorkers in deciding to leave the city. Blake and I woke up on the morning of March 18th and talked through how bad things were getting and how much worse they could get. At that point the situation was changing rapidly, in a matter of hours, not days. It seemed that Northern Italy was just a few weeks ahead of us, offering up a preview of the horror show to come for the city. It didn’t look good. I told Blake that I wanted to leave, to go quarantine in the midwest and then stay with family for a while. He listened to me lay out my logic and he agreed, so we rented a car that same day, worried that federal highways may soon shut down as was being discussed as a possibility in the news. We began our road trip first thing the next morning. To understand how quickly our outlook on the situation had changed, just one or two days before we’d done this massive grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s in hopes of having enough food to get us through the next few weeks. We obviously had no intention of leaving then.

Looking back, we both agree that we made the best decision for us, but it wasn’t easy. Prior to that, we knew we’d be moving out of the city for good in the late spring or early summer. I knew then that I’d be attending grad school in the Boston area in the fall and we both wanted to spend some time traveling and with family before moving to Massachusetts. We had these big visions of what our last few weeks in the city would look like—our goodbye tour as we thought of it. But, as soon as we made the decision to temporarily leave we knew that when we came back it would probably just be to pack up our things and move out. We were right; that’s exactly what happened when we moved out over the course of two short and chaotic days in late May. In both our rush to leave the city in March and to permanently move out in May neither of us really had time to give the city or our friends the proper farewell we wanted to. I feel almost guilty for being sad about that—I know we’re both so fortunate to be healthy, to work in jobs that could be done remotely, and to have had family we were able to stay with—but it didn’t change how I felt when I wrote this poem back in March: sad that our time in New York had come to such an odd and rushed end.