It’s the first week of December, and walking through lower Manhattan feels like being trapped inside a chaotic snow globe.
Every street corner is covered with Christmas tree vendors selling wrapped-up evergreens and wreaths, creating miniature forests in the heart of the urban jungle. The smell of pine overpowers the scent of piss, and the twinkling lights bleeding into the red blinking glow of police sirens make me feel a little more at home.
But New York is a city that’s always propelling forward, powering full speed ahead. So, alongside the makeshift woodlands and ethereal campgrounds, you can find sparklers, and glitter hats and glasses that spell out the coming year—2020—or perhaps the tidings of the future, a happy New Year to you, and you, and you.
In this city, your true self can always be more authentic. Your best year can always be better, beat out by the what’s yet to come.
I’ve heard people, outsiders mostly, critique this attitude. They wish New York would slow down and exhale. Settle for what it has, for what it is right now, in this moment. But like me, the city refuses to settle for less. It’s too ambitious to pause for a please and thank you.
Instead, it remains hopeful. It knows that power lies in possibility.
As I step out of the SPP Tower for the very last time and onto the cobblestoned streets of South Street Seaport, I feel the light inklings of a December hailstorm graze against my cheek. As I look up toward the sky, hundreds of tiny little white flecks of winter dust begin to descend upon the city, like birds migrating south for the season. I wipe one off my cheek then make the decision to walk home in the squall, instead of taking the six train. A long trek, or perhaps even a frolic, is exactly what I need to clear my head and my lungs.
The first part of my body I ever waxed was my upper lip. I was eight years old. Leila was twelve, but a self-pronounced big girl. She had already been waxing for four years and was thus in charge of taking me to my first appointment.
We went to a Korean spa in Midtown Manhattan, a long subway ride away from our apartment in Crown Heights. Tightly clutching Leila’s hand, I bravely marched into the establishment and announced to the receptionist that I was ready to be beautiful. The woman behind the register had cocked her head.
You’re already beautiful, she had said. On the inside.
I thought was so silly—what’s the point of being beautiful if others can’t see it?
I followed her into the dimly lit stall in the far back, right corner. I asked if Leila could come with me but was told the space was too small for three. She had to wait outside.
The room smelled of cucumber and was painted lime green. There was classical music playing in the background. The woman—I think her name was Kim—asked me to lie down with my head facing the wall and my feet closest to the door. She twirled the hot wax around on a thick Popsicle stick then slowly lowered it onto my face, spreading it over my philtrum like peanut butter.
I was surprised by how good it felt—warm and soothing, like standing a little too close to an open fire and drinking in the heat.
Is it going to hurt?
She smiled down at me, like Zeus from the top of Mount Olympus or a bird about to shit some good luck on top of your head.
Yes. But then it will be over. And you’ll look like the person you truly are.
It was then that I was overwhelmed with a paralyzing fear—of pain, of the moment my hair follicles were ripped out from under my skin like a child from its mother’s arms.
For the first time in my life, I felt my hands begin to shake and my lips quiver. My heart raced a mile a minute, and I found my nose couldn’t keep up with the pace, so I began breathing in and out of my mouth. Kim noticed instantly and took a step back.
What happens if I back out?
Then you’ll stay like this forever.
Kim gestured to the wax that had already hardened into the moldings of my face.
So my choices are to stay and get hurt, or leave and hate myself for it?
Tough decision.
Kim sat down on the parlor bed next to me, swinging the Skechers on her feet back and forth.
Life is full of tough decisions. Making a choice and sticking with it shows strength of character.
Even when both options suck?
Even then.
I shut my eyes tightly, made peace with my resolution, and awaited judgment day.
Seconds later, I screamed. The sting of the wax seared my skin, causing my eyes to well up. But my heartbeat slowed its cadence, and my hands folded into my chest.
Kim handed me the mirror, and I peered at my reflection with the curiosity of a newborn. What greeted me stung even more than the wax.
For the first time, I looked a little more like myself. Or, at the very least, the image I’ve always had in my head. I realized, then and there, how deeply I’d internalized the Western idealization of beauty, the time and energy and I had wasted feeling trapped inside of my bag of skin. But the fat, the blood, the bones—none of it mattered. Appearances are easy to fake. I could mold myself into whatever I wanted to look like. I could become anyone I wanted to be. But first, I had to figure out what feeling like myself meant. That would be the real challenge.
From that day forward, I, too, promised to never look back, only forward.
As I make my way up Pearl Street and toward Bowery, I begin to skip. One foot in front of the other, my body jiving to a tune that’s unseen, unheard, and unspoken. I haven’t moved this way since I was a child, and it feels liberating, like taking off your bra at the tail end of the day.
I kick up my ankles, moving faster and faster, brushing off looks of confusion and pity from onlooking New Yorkers who don’t agree with the practice. As I fly by bakeries and bodegas, I people watch my fellow NYC locals. I skip across red streetlights and into oncoming holiday traffic, past honking cabdrivers and Uber Pool passengers crying about their latest breakup to a sympathetic stranger. I skip past dog shit and carolers; men running down St. James Place with a bouquet of flowers in their arms and a smile smacked upon their faces; and women hunched over benches, wiping away tears and wailing without a care for who can see them. I skip with preschool children in yellow traffic vests, all lined up like ducks in row, being walked toward the Tenement Museum for a midday field trip. I skip away from the last six months and toward the rest of my life.
“Excuse me!”
A short, young girl with big brown eyes, bleached white hair, and roots the color of mine catches up to me. She speaks with a hint of an accent, the kind that peeks out from behind the blinds at the very end of a syllable or in the mispronunciation of a word. I recognize that glitch in vowels—it’s the kind of stutter you aren’t born with but grow into by hearing a Middle Eastern parent repeat it over and over.
I smile at her, and she looks back at me with a startling familiarity.
“Salam, so sorry to bother you, but are you Noora?” Her eyes wrinkle in the corners, and her baby hairs fly in the December wind.
A tiny snowflake catches her eyelashes, and she just leaves it there, without pausing to brush it off.
“Yes, baleh! My apologies, remind me of your name?” I’m embarrassed that I can’t place her face.
The girl laughs.
“We’ve never met,” she explains. “My name is Fatimeh, and I’m a huge NoorYorkCity fan. I’ve been following you since you first started blogging in 2015—I just love your style. Like, that thrifted brown corduroy suit you wore last Monday? Such a vibe. Even your bright-yellow puffer you’re wearing right now is serious goals.”
“Thank you!” I clutch my heart, taken aback by the flattery. I’ve never met a reader in the wild before.
“No, thank you. For writing about being young and a woman and Middle Eastern and American. I always felt like every single part of my identity was at odds with the other, tugged in different directions, close to being torn apart. No matter how much I messed with myself, I could never make the pieces fit together. And then I discovered your blog. For the first time, I realized it was okay to feel like an ever-evolving mess, to live in a space that’s neither here nor there. To have multiple homes and no real homeland. To believe so many conflicting things and nothing at all.”
She opens her arms wide, and I reach down and give her a hug. Our two bodies meld together.
A sense of purpose washes over me. Every muscle and bone in my body both relaxes and reenergizes at once.
“Thank you for reading,” I say wholeheartedly. I mean every word.
“Of course. I’d follow your writing anywhere.”
And then she’s gone, as quickly as she appeared. I’m left smiling like a sap, alone on a New York City street corner.
I reach Chatham Square and turn left onto Mott Street. The red lights from the Chinese open-air markets flood the street and reflect off the white sheets lining the tops of garbage cans. Peking duck wafts past me and into Lower Manhattan, like the exhaust of a parked car with the engine still running. The snowing has stopped, turning to a pale, graying slush beneath my feet.
I take another step forward, and the melting water vapors below me explode upward into my face, like a piñata. I let out a childlike giggle and take another step.
Blam.
Another sludge puddle detonates beneath the bottom of my boot. My walking turns to marching, big, grandiose steps like a soldier or a Radio City Rockette. I’m having so much fun playing in the gunk of what once was metropolitan snow that I don’t even notice a pedestrian behind me.
Without thinking, I leap into another shallow pool with both feet, causing an eruption the size of Staten Island.
The dirty ice sprays all over my face, hands, and clothes, creating a tie-dye pattern that can only be procured from playing in the mud. Unfortunately, my fellow passerby gets hit by the debris too. They let out a small yelp, as if I’d hit them with my car.
Wiping the slush from off their face, they turn to look at me.
It’s a man in his early thirties. He’s wearing a long, cushioned coat that looks like a sleeping bag and suede boots. His hair is slicked back with so much gel, he resembles a broker, but his long, neon-pink acrylic nails suggest he’s never signed on the dotted line a day in his life.
Has he wandered all the way here from the gallery district in Chelsea, where he owns a small one-bedroom with his boyfriend of five years and three cats? Or perhaps he’s from Queens, and lost his way back to Astoria somewhere along the W train, and now refuses to take the L. He could be born and raised in Harlem, a Midtown maverick, or a complete anomaly by way of Boerum Hill. Honestly, your guess would be as good as mine; I’m struggling to place him. He’s difficult to define, to put in a box.
We lock eyes, and he sneers at me. I smile back. I know a fellow local when I see one.
“Hey, watch it, lady!” he screeches. “This is New York City, not Minnesota or wherever the hell you’re from. We don’t play in the snow here. We walk as quickly and as quietly as we can, without drawing too much attention to ourselves, because we’ve got places to be and people to see. And if you get one more speck of dirt on my brand-new Burberry coat, I’m going to make you Venmo me the full price of my dry cleaning. Got it?”
I nod my head, a mischievous grin spreading from cheek to cheek.
Then I take a deep breath and jump.
New Yorkers are fucking crazy—myself included.