Why I Broke Up with New York

I cannot tell you the moment that New York began for me, only that I began in New York. There are stories from the months before I was born, when I was still nestled inside my mother like a Yonah Schimmel knish to go. In September, during her first trimester, the city was overtaken by a heat wave so mighty that it made being inside without A.C. unbearable—you had to stay moving just to create a breeze. My mom remembers thinking that New York hadn’t felt so unhinged since the Summer of Sam, that the heat lent an edge of hysteria to everyday interactions. Circling the block one day, she ran into an equally sweaty and disoriented friend on the corner of Broadway and Houston, who told her that the sculptor Carl Andre had been accused of throwing his wife, the seminal Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, out a window the previous night. Despite the temperature, my mother turned toward home.