On Loving and Leaving New York (and the wrong men)

How could I leave what I did love so much?

I fell in love the first time I visited New York, both with the city and my AirBnb host. Loose on the love – I was newly 21. I was also relatively naïve to dating and the ways men can manipulate in pursuit of their sexual gratification, so a less jaded, more trusting of strangers version of myself said yes when the host of my 4-day rental—whom I’d never met—messaged me and asked me to get lunch in the city.

That afternoon, we met for sushi near Central Park, which turned into a train ride downtown to walk the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset. While I took photos of the skyline, admiring the architecture of the bridge and Dumbo beyond, he stood back and captured photos of me, something slightly less intimate than the polaroid pictures we took of each other a few minutes later. Then came New York pizza slices on his roof for dinner, a date the next night—if hookah and a club can be called that, the flood of warmth from his hand on my chest in the taxi, and us sleeping together the night before I flew back to Los Angeles. “Stay,” he begged into my head on his chest the next morning. I considered every hormonal/chemical impulse to turn off my phone and pretend that my boss wasn’t currently in a taxi to pick me up. In the end, I went with “I can’t, but I don’t want to leave.” It was true: I wanted nothing more than to stay with him in that bed in New York City.

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” It’s the quote I captioned my Instagram photo with, the one he took of me on the bridge. But it didn’t just apply to Manhattan. It took 48 hours to feel like I belonged with this man who was still, more or less, a perfect stranger. I flew to Los Angeles that morning knowing two things: I needed to live in New York one day and I needed to see him again. The latter happened a month later when he invited me to stay with him for a week in December. This was the rom com trip of my dreams, experiencing the magic of New York during Christmas time, until it wasn’t.

The second to last day of my visit, he broke it off with me in the Times Square Forever 21 (I can LOL now, though the cheap purses are probably still traumatized by this interaction) to go back to the girlfriend in New Jersey that I didn’t know he had. He left me to sleep in his bed alone, the one I’d just had sex with him in for a week straight. The same bed that he begged me to stay in just a month prior now held my discarded body as I laid awake all night too hollow to sleep. He was the second person I’d ever had sex with, though I technically consider him the first. Not that this matters all that much. Sex is vulnerable regardless of one’s history.

I gave so much of myself to someone who threw me away without as much as a text to see if I made it back to California. This should’ve been the end of things with AirBnb man, but it wasn’t. I’d never felt so deeply for a person and I didn’t want to let go of that feeling. In hindsight, it wasn’t even him I was enamored by. It was the way that I felt when I was with him (thank you, oxytocin), but my young self couldn’t tell the difference. And so I kept trying because it felt too difficult to leave what did feel good, despite how bad it all felt, too. I overlooked reality, the latter, in favor of what could be: a love with this man who was not capable or deserving of loving me.

A year later, after deleting his number and making my friend write it down in her dresser just in case (CRAZY AM I RIGHT LOL), I cut it off and made good on the former love: New York City. After a treacherous apartment hunt, I settled for a fourth-floor, one-bedroom walk-up about the size of a living room in any other state. I signed the lease, flew back to Los Angeles to pack up my life in West Hollywood, and was ready to move…right up until I met a man four days before I was set to fly out. We’ll call him restaurant man, as that’s where we met on a night I really didn’t want to leave the house. It happens like that, doesn’t it? When we least expect it. Now i’m over here like HI UNIVERSE I’M READY, I EXPECT IT and there’s minor crickets (minus the person I do have a crush on, but that’s for a different day because crushes can be bat shit).

Restaurant man reminded me so much of Airbnb man that my psyche worked to replicate what was. Maybe I will have those good feelings again with this new person, my conscious said. Maybe he or I will be different and I’ll get it right this time, my unconscious said. Maybe I can master previous trauma, repetition compulsion said.

After a date at Dave N Busters in Hollywood, to this day one of the most memorable of my life, we spent every possible minute together before I left to New York. I was hooked, again, so much so that if this man got down on one knee and asked me to marry him, I would have said yes. Psychotic behavior, admittedly, but I was 22 years old.

He drove me and my dogs to the airport at 4:00 am and we had the cliché airport kiss before I moved onto my next adventure, one that didn’t involve him because he would not do long distance. Eight hours later, as the plane landed at Newark Airport, a knowing washed over me: right now, New York is not for me. I tried for two weeks, lugging jam-packed boxes of clothes up four flights of stairs before I got wildly sick and spent most of the time unwell and heartbroken in an apartment I hated. When I did get outside to walk to the bookstore in Soho, I was met with that same sinking feeling I had upon landing—the magic of this city couldn’t’t compare to the magic of restaurant man.

So I broke my lease, packed up my life, and left New York, hoping to fall right back into what I thought would be a fulfilling relationship. The problem is, restaurant man was not looking for that. “You’re a wife,” he ended up saying, “and I’m not ready for that.”

Once again, baby Alegra—before the deep therapy work—stuck around despite him making it clear that he would not date me. My unhealed parts of self tried hard. Maybe he’d change his mind. Maybe I’d be eventually be good enough for him to change his mind for. Maybe if I gratified him sexually, he’d want me to stay—something I’d internalized from the misogynistic world we live in and past sexual experiences. Maybe just maybe. Being with him felt so good and, once again, I found myself favoring the promise of something instead of reality. He wasn’t right for me but what if one day he would be?

I don’t regret breaking my lease and returning to LA after two weeks in New York. New man or not, it was not the right time for New York. When I moved back into my West Hollywood apartment, I worked toward acquiring my Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology, left the world of talent public relations, and pursued licensure as a therapist specializing in the treatment of OCD.

Three years later, the Covid pandemic shut down the world and its resulting quarantine moved all of my clients to teletherapy. For the foreseeable future, I would not have to be in an office. This meant that I could work remotely from anywhere. After six years in Los Angeles, I was bored, depressed, and ready for my next adventure: New York City round 2.

For the second time in my 20s, I I packed up my belongings and flew across the country to move into my dream apartment, one with exposed brick, in the heart of the East Village. I spent two years in lower Manhattan followed by another two in Brooklyn Heights, a historic neighborhood on the East River that boasts unobstructed views of the city.

In those four years, I moved toward everything I could dream up. I picnicked at parks with my friends and books, stayed out way too late drinking way too much, ate more pizza than was necessary, rollerbladed by the river, did the occasional drug, re-created prom in Time’s Square at Bubba Gumps in a full ballgown with my girlfriends, made it my mission to visit every bookstore known to the city, got spontaneous tattoos and piercings, hosted a Taylor Swift birthday party on Cornelia St. I opened my first office in Midtown, hired two interns, and got the morning commute via subway with coffee that I’d always dreamt of. I met my best friends, whom became family, and built the most meaningful relationships I’ve ever had. I was living the dream, but it did not feel like it toward the end of those four years.

In truth, a lot of my time in New York involved me contemplating leaving. New York is the greatest city in the world and New York is a lot. It’s overstimulating, expensive, crowded, and void of the ease my body was craving in the later years. I was paying $4000+ on a one-bedroom apartment, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, to spend much of my time reading in my apartment. In other words, I was throwing out an exorbitant amount of money to live in a city I was not making use of. I stopped drinking much and couldn’t’t be bothered to go to clubs, bars, and raves with my friends. I was tired of public transport, walking twenty minutes to the grocery store, and how exhausting it was to get to work: two different trains and eight flights of stairs. Everyday tasks felt like massive feats.

Toward the end, I knew that my time in New York was done. I had known, but not as urgently as that final two years. New York was no longer my dream, something difficult to accept amongst die-hard New Yorkers who would never, ew, move to Los Angeles. I was living in the most magical place, surrounded by people who reiterated this whenever possible, so why would I leave? Wasn’t this what everyone wanted? What I ignored: this was not what I wanted.

Maybe I can get there, I told myself. Maybe I just need more time—they say it takes ten years to become a true New Yorker. Maybe I will fall in love with it like others have. Maybe I’ll fall in love with someone who will keep me here. Maybe I’ll stop feeling like I want to leave. Maybe I won’t have FOMO if I stay. Maybe leaving is the wrong choice. Maybe I’m settling for second-best, Los Angeles, at the ripe age of 30 if I leave.

So I overstayed, in New York and with those men, in the pursuit of a promise. A future promise—that one day I will feel wholly content living in New York, that the man will change himself and his mind—void of actual security in the now. I overstayed because of scarcity, the fear that it was the only city or person that will make me happy, despite the fact that there were so many aspects of each that made me unhappy. And I overstayed because I did love New York.

I loved the energy of the city and my doorman and the dozens of coffee shops in a few-block radius and the architecture of the buildings and the people (they’re nice, despite the stereotype) and the culture and how there was always something to do right outside of my apartment door. I loved the stoops and my friends and dollar pizza slices and the parks and the way that I could cry in public with nobody noticing. I loved feeling like at any moment, something extraordinary could happen.

There was good in New York, which was hard to reconcile with my desire to leave. How could I want to move away from something that I do love so much? That I have felt so deeply for? There was also good in those men, even if most of it was feeling and what I brought to both situationships.

Ten years after Airbnb boy broke my heart, I truly feel like I’ve learned the lesson: we can like, even love, what is not right for us and that is not a reason to stay. Dismissing reality in favor of what might be possibly be can lead us to miss out on what is truly meant for us.

I needed Los Angeles, something I knew in my bones for the last two years of my time in New York. I craved slowness, nature, driving, a bungalow in Silver Lake with a view, and quiet mornings in the garden with my coffee and a book. I needed a yard for myself and the dogs. I needed space and I needed ease.

Finally, I took the leap. I left New York, just like I walked away from those men. It was not easy, especially when I was moving to a city traumatized by wildfires and one that I’d previously endured so much trauma in, but I did it. I stopped staying in what wasn’t right for me in the hopes that, at some point, it would be.

What I learned: leaving can reward us with something beautiful in reality, not beautiful in promise. And that something just might be even more valuable. For me, right now, that’s Los Angeles. And men who read, unlike restaurant man one who told me he’d never read a book in his life (big yikesssss).