No Sleep Til Brooklyn
Moving to a new city is like getting the chance to start all over. It’s exciting. Inspiring. An adventure. It’s a rush comparable to the likes of any life milestone—full to the brim with anxiety, anticipation, curiosity, and speculation of the unknown. The opposite of Cheers where, actually nobody knows your name. It was exactly what we needed.
Ben and I had talked about moving away from Rochester eventually. It was never anything concrete. It was always that, eventually. Partly because we didn’t know where we wanted to end up. Rochester had been our home for as long as we knew each other. The idea of picking our entire lives up and transplanting was enticing but seemed uncharacteristic. We had a nice apartment, food on the table, were close to family and were regulars at our favorite Rochester spots. There wasn’t really a reason for it, but one day we threw the idea out there. Maybe we should just move to Brooklyn.
We weren’t the first to think it. It seemed almost everyone we knew had made the move right after college. Couldn’t be that hard. But my idea of New York City up to this point had been getting Starbucks at Rockefeller Center and seeing TRL in Times Square when I was 12. It was a place I’d seen in movies, a place where my favorite late night talk shows filmed, a place with a reputation of danger, glamor, and opportunity. A place familiar but much more alien when it came down to it. Ben had never moved outside of the Rochester area…ever. The thought of becoming full-on Brooklynites (is that what we are now?) was, well, terrifying. We didn’t even know where to start.
Lucky for us, that good crop of RIT alums was there to help. We started reaching out, tapping all our resources for details on getting an apartment, neighborhood lines, mastering the subway, the right way to eat pizza, and most importantly, job leads. Because one thing we quickly learned was that moving to Brooklyn would be expensive. Not like treat-yourself-splurge-a-little expensive. Expensive like we’d have to move in with Ben’s parents for four months in order to actually do this. So when our lease ended, we packed up the cats and headed for Shortsville.
I’ll spare you all the details of living with in-laws, but it worked. Thanks to free rent and meals, we’d saved the most money we’d had in our entire lives. And like clockwork, Ben landed his dream job. To quote our excitement, “I guess we’re doing this!”
Next came the apartment. Arguably the biggest obstacle we’d face, we’d heard horror stories—everything from fake realtors stealing your deposit to bedbugs and curbside shootings. It also didn’t help we had 3 cats. But once we decided on a neighborhood, we reached out to a broker at a trusted (read: 5-star Yelp reviewed) firm. We made an appointment and headed down to Crown Heights to see for ourselves.
We chose Crown Heights because most of our friends live here or very close. It was in our newly adjusted NYC-friendly budget (still cringing, BTW). It was close to the trains we needed. It had amazing coffee and food. And although it has a history of gangs and violence, it’s up and coming and for the most part, welcomes people just like us. People willing to wear just under a week’s worth of clothes for just over two weeks (gross). People willing to sleep on people’s couches, floors, and corporate apartment beds (could be worse). People willing to shell out three times monthly rent and wait with baited breath for approval.
We saw one apartment. We put a down deposit. And after a week of nerve-wracking anxiety and many detailed phone calls about feline behavioral traits, signed the lease. We celebrated by falling asleep at 9pm that night. Booking the rental truck, coordinating a flight home, and figuring out the BQE would have to wait.
We flew home into Rochester just before midnight Friday night. Despite a huge rainstorm and some tearful goodbyes, we packed the Penske Saturday. By 7am Sunday we were on the road back to the city. I’ll also spare you the details of how I made the move without a single cup of coffee, navigated two vehicles at once, and how our parents met for the first time ever while carrying furniture up three flights of stairs. It was the longest day we’d had in a while but 16 hours later, we were lying in our own bed in our own apartment. We’d defeated the odds. We’d done it. We moved to Brooklyn.
So yes, we’re tired. We’re overwhelmed. We’re broke as all hell. But we’re here and everyday we’re making this place more like home as best we can—finding our go-to spots, making new friends, catching up with old ones—slowly getting rid of the boxes and replacing them with things that remind us of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we want to be. I think that’s all we could have ever asked for. A winning lottery ticket would have been a nice touch, though.