I just came across these old photos of my long lost, tiny Manhattan bedroom and find myself feeling nostalgic. The shot above was taken soon after I moved in. I’d picked out the Malm bed and Billy bookcases from Ikea in Brooklyn and did my best to make it them my own (faux fur throw from Williams Sonoma Home, vintage antique knobs from the Chelsea flea market…). By the bed sits a deck of old Tiffany’s playing cards—John and I would play “war” (very sophisticated…) for hours on end. The vintage garden seat I picked up at an antique shop in Maine and in no time my bookshelves were brimming with used novels and other bright trinkets. The last shot is of my desk. The plaster shell bookends were a dollar each at a thrift shop. Above the desk hangs one of my favorite “inspiration boards” — I wonder what became of it? In memory of my time in New York I’ll end with an expert from my favorite Didion essay. She said it best…
“It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”
– Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That
