“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
Toni Morrison
1. NEW YORK CITY -- 2011
I started riding the subway home by myself when I was 11. I’d drag my roller backpack down the 86th Street station stairs and catch the 6 train to 59th, emerging to the smell of Nuts 4 Nuts being hawked on Lexington. Then, I’d zigzag through the perfumed halls of Bloomingdale’s to warm up or cool down on my trek to York Avenue, walking beneath the tram station that connects Manhattan to Roosevelt Island, past the Queensboro Bridge, down to First Avenue. East I’d go, past the blackened windows of Sapphire on 60th, Bed Bath & Beyond (the biggest store I had ever set foot in), Dangerfield’s, and the ancient arched ceilings of Food Emporium, where I would get lost in pew-like mazes of processed foods.
Some days, I’d take a few quarters to the bodega on 62nd and 1st to fetch my mom a paper. I’d pass the silent old man with the tangled nest of hair sitting outside his shop between First and York, his windows barred, behind them a jumble of brass parts. In my mind, they are lamps.
Eventually, I’d end up near home, close to York Avenue, one of Manhattan’s quieter streets pressed against the ribbon of cars on the FDR Drive, which hugs the East River.
My mother once told me that the East River is actually not a river, but an estuary. Standing at its edge, my small hands grasping the light gray bars of the barrier and my eyes landing on the candy cane-striped smokestacks of Big Allis (once the largest power plant on Earth), I noticed how the water didn’t flow so much as it writhed.
Alive, in a way that made me feel watched.
It was an in-between body, shifting with the tides and runoff; it ran thick with all that which we wanted to forget.
I heard a story as a child about a girl my age who was riding her scooter along the river and fell in. She was rescued by an onlooker. I thought often about what this scene must have looked like. What would happen if I fell into the river? Could I grasp onto a piece of floating garbage? Would a cormorant peck my eyes out? What if a jet ski tour happened to pass by and came to my rescue, or, conversely, ran me over?
I wonder today if my parents told me this story to scare me into staying far from the water’s edge while my body was small enough to slip beneath the railing. Searching the news for “girl falls into East River” today returns a litany of tales of girls and women of all ages falling in, too many to validate the specific story I was once told.
Maybe the truth is beside the point.
2. DUBAI -- 2019
I stayed at a hostel on the 65th floor of a high-rise in Dubai. Signs plastered in the elevator warning that hostels were not allowed. Yet, there I was, staying in one. It was Ramadan, so I spent my days meandering through one shopping mall after another until it was time for Iftar, when I would eat luxurious multi-course meals by myself on land made just a couple of years ago.
I went skydiving over the Palm Jumeirah Islands, a man made archipelago shaped like a palm tree or skeleton, jutting into the Persian Gulf. In free fall, I spotted The World Islands in the distance: artificial landforms still being dredged to the surface, plots of sand piled into the outlines of nations. They were meant to form a map of the globe, each “country” open to private development, but only a fraction had been built.
It looked less like Earth and more like a mirage, glinting in and out of view, half-erased by the tide.
When the parachute opened, my vision blurred. Black shapes floated across my eyes. I had read that this could happen from the shock of falling through space or a harness pulled too tight. I tried to cling to the outlines of buildings blooming in and out of view, my eyes open, seeking something solid while drifting like a balloon. But I couldn’t.
The instructor strapped to my back shook me to life after we landed safely on reclaimed ground.
I’d later learn that The World Islands were built by dredging the seabed, bulldozing coral reefs, and erasing ecosystems older than many human civilizations. All so that developers could pour concrete and name their new land things like “Switzerland,” “Germany,” and “Main Europe”. But from above, it all looked as precarious as sitting at the edge of a plane’s exit door feels.
The outlines of continents sketched into place appeared less like evidence of technological feats, and more like visions from a dream of a world submerged.
Perhaps there’s truth in naming fragile, fabricated land after nations whose relative stability was forged through centuries of extraction.
A mirror / not a mask.
3. NEW YORK CITY
I don’t often talk about where I grew up. When I do, I’m unsure where to locate it in other peoples’ understandings of New York. “Midtown East” feels closest to the truth, perhaps because it’s more directional than descriptive. It feels right for a place whose identity I never fully grasped, a place that seemed like it was there to serve other places. The buildings owned by the hospitals, the big box stores lined up by the bridge, the mouth of the highway emptying cars onto my block.
New York as an idea looms large in the global ether. It’s a city that serves others too, a place that, in the global imagination, has taken on the quality of raw material from which ambition, dreams, and capital are spun.
I resent that fever dream, and latch onto my own New York. My New York is the fervor of the Atlantic Avenue train platform on a summer day when the colors of the city and its organisms melt and evaporate into a gaseous intoxicant. It’s the sweat of strangers passing by each other downtown with ant-like logic. It’s running down Delancey to catch the F, weaving in and out between people and dogs and bikes, out of breath, feeling as though sprinting is the only way to keep up with the energy in the air.
4. ICELAND -- 2024
My partner and I rented a tiny car, an e.Go, that only had two front seats and felt precariously lightweight in the Icelandic gusts. I had always wanted to see orca whales, so we drove to the Snæfellsjökull peninsula, where the wind slammed our tiny car’s doors shut and rattled the whole of our AirBnB at night. The boat company told us it was too windy to go out on the water, so we went to a shark museum instead. The next day we drove to Westman Island, known for its puffins. We hiked the length of the island in winds so strong I was afraid I would blow away into the sea, and somehow, we saw only a single puffin our whole time there. In a taxi, our driver pointed out to a speck of land off the coast: “Look there, it’s the youngest island in the world”. He was not counting The World Islands.
We were there during the period of Fagradalsfjall volcanic activity. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime eruptions, people said, because you could easily hike to within a few hundred meters of the lava flows.
When we first arrived, all I saw were brown, gravelly hills of Iceland. There were loads of hikers, mainly Europeans, lots of Germans with hiking poles and technical shoes. I felt like I was on a pilgrimage, in a line of foreigners walking towards something greater than myself. About halfway through the hike, I heard something that sounded like the Earth cracking in two, and I craned my neck to see an electric stream of lava erupting from the gravel.
The lava moved in slow motion, expanding the moment of eruption into something malleable, as if time itself had warped to hold it in place. Every person stood in audible shock, many brought to tears, some to their knees, as ribbons of molten Earth shed themselves from the sky, suspended in the air just long enough to make you doubt your own senses.
And then, in the time it took to blink, it was over, until the Earth decided once more to exhale pieces of itself.
We got close enough that the heat from the lava almost stung. But more than the eruptions, I was entranced by the lava field, where black magma cracked and gurgled as it cooled. I felt like I was witnessing a world that was not my own.
I was a voyeur who had snuck into the realm of geological time, so vast and confusingly brilliant I felt the borders between myself and this world grow thin and fuzzy around the edges.
5. NEW YORK CITY-- 2024
On a visit home to see my parents and get my hair cut in the storefront that was once the lamp shop, I went to eat dinner at the Greek restaurant down the block that was once the Turkish restaurant, and before that, the two consequent Japanese restaurants. Over souvlaki, I saw myself sitting in the exact same space as I had years prior—in space that existed, places that did not.
While I don’t feel a specific attachment to the blocks I grew up along, it's in these moments that I feel undeniably at home amidst a palimpsest that feels as unique as a fingerprint. Reflecting on my childhood, I realize that even the parts of my neighborhood that once felt firm were in their own states of flux. Going to visit my parents today requires contending with time as an animating force of place and self – as a material that moves fast and slow and erratically through space in turn with the seasons and capital.
Food Emporium becomes a Michaels craft store, which in turn becomes a Trader Joe’s; Bed Bath & Beyond morphs into a Container Store; the nail salon where I got my first manicure becomes a varicose vein clinic; the always empty, impeccably clean store that once sold suits (my mother always thought it was a front) is a brewery, then a frozen yogurt shop, then stands empty.
Neighbors die. Buildings are torn down. My parents look older. Some moments barely happen, while others stretch out like lava suspended in the sky. For a second, you believe that time itself may simply stop, but it never does.
Where it falls, the world reshapes itself around what is left behind.
6. TODAY
The Viele Map of 1865 shows New York’s early grid imposed over a vein-like network of streams and wetlands.
It is the city before it donned its disguise.
It reveals an outline of an island that lacks rigid sides and a smooth interior.
But today, we don’t call it a wetland. We call it a flood.
I think a lot about disaster imagery. Photos of people canoeing down streets that were once driveways, or neighborhoods in Los Angeles reduced to ash. Water rushing into the Grand Army Plaza train station on my morning commute, running down stairs like New Yorkers rushing, late to work. Later that day, a tree, torn from the earth by wind and rain, crushing a car a block from my last apartment in Brooklyn. The same image I’d see on the homepage of The New York Times.
Climate scientists are increasingly shocked at how catastrophes they predicted would occur a decade from now are happening today. Time is folding in on itself.
When the line separating the everyday from the apocalyptic grows faint, I think of the artificial islands rising from the Gulf, a literal world remade not by plate tectonics, but by hubris.
And I think of the volcano in Iceland: Earth’s quiet authority making itself known, without permission or promise. I feel a bit lightheaded in both worlds: one remakes the Earth in pursuit of control, while the other remakes it without needing us at all.
What can be learned from these sites of juncture where, like in an estuary, two forces meet and mix? Where human time and geologic time grate and grind?
In response to the increasingly tenuous state in which humans and corporate headquarters occupy New York, some planners want to build more land—harden the coastline, perhaps even extend Manhattan to the point where it would literally consume Governor’s Island. As if the land and the water do not possess a life of their own.
I think about the East River lapping at the esplanade on days when the river swelled. I think about the fear of falling in, but even moreso, I think about the fear of being consumed, and not just by water. Storefronts change hands like a wrinkled dollar bill. Billion-dollar resiliency projects, predicted to fail, tear up parks anyway.
Maybe that’s what it means to love New York: to live inside that blur, to feel the ground shifting beneath your feet and stay anyway. To exist side-by-side both with the things hastening collapse, and the pulse of life roaring against them.