Last month I spent 48 hours in Brooklyn after many years away.
Once I landed, I knew I needed to walk around. I come from a long line of walkers. We walk to think, we walk to sweat. My mother is possibly the fastest non-professional speed walker of all time. My father once walked from one side of the country to the other.
It hadn’t occurred to me before arriving in the city I used to call home, but the moment I stepped outside, I knew I had to have my feet on the ground as much as possible.
The reason for spending a tight 48 hours in Brooklyn was to celebrate Ashley’s 40th birthday. We’ve been friends for nearly 10 years but had never met in real life before then. We spent our first day together preparing for her birthday celebration and acclimating to seeing each other outside of a computer screen.
It was weird and wonderful.
Every corner, every bit of brownstone, every sweetly specific street sign felt like a song playing only for me. Maybe they were just sirens. Or maybe it was because I felt so much sturdier. The 40-something me could remind the 20-something me how good it can feel here because of how good we feel now, with a bit more life in our bones.
A feeling only an old neighborhood, in a borough covered in tall tales of years past could understand.
I told my ex-fiancé this.
While I stood in his home that he shares with his partner and two daughters.
Just after I hugged him for the first time in over 11 years.
At a dinner party, his partner perfectly planned to celebrate our mutual friend, who he also used to date.
Who is now my creative partner after a near-decade of friendship, on her 40th birthday.
Weird and wonderful.
When he asked what I had planned for my final few hours in Brooklyn, I answered: “I just feel like I need to walk around for a while, put my feet on the ground, ya know?” And he did know. In fact, he might be the only person who could.
A lifetime ago, for a while, this was our neighborhood. It’s where we planted our own seeds, back when we thought we’d watch them grow together. A tree with both our names etched in its roots. We lived and struggled and loved all over this borough.
I rehearsed for my first play not far from where we stood. Coincidentally, it's also where he and I met, playing high school sweethearts. I made a forever friend in the director of that same play. After rehearsals, I would go home to my first Brooklyn apartment—a loft I shared with another new and forever friend.
I’ve lived in so many different places over the years, each holding a significant part of my story in its coordinates. The Brooklyn part of the story was often hard. Sometimes it was sad and lonely. Other times it was wonderful.
It isn’t often you get to step into a makeshift alternate timeline, one where you see how the other side of your story played out. It isn’t often you get to stare your past in the face and have it look back, not only reminding you of forgotten bits you may have haphazardly left behind but evidence of how well it all worked out.
The trees still grew.
On my final day, Ash and I walked for a bit before landing in a cozy and comforting restaurant that somehow reminded me of home—not a former Brooklyn, but my Grandmother’s house—an element I wasn’t expecting. It was there, surrounded by warmth, that we swapped stories of loves lost and evolved. No matter how close you become with someone, there is an intimacy that can only be reached when you can lay hands on each other and share a meal.
The conversation deepened when I ordered the exact same meal as her ex, the last person she’d been to this restaurant with. I asked for the whole story and she gave it. These were the kinds of details you can only share in person, holding hands and exchanging knowing looks that only those of us who have grieved a big love would recognize.
In short, he betrayed her in a way that rewires the heart. And when I offered to pull up we ultimately decided he was too many trains away for such a short trip.
It all led me to ask how she could continue to live in the same spaces, seeing and feeling the remnants of their love story on a regular basis. I simultaneously realized I’d never really had to do that. Or maybe I simply chose not to because I couldn’t.
But here we were, breaking bread and mending.
There is beauty in the history we all share. So many people divorce themselves from their past—including me—never looking back long enough to confirm what existed before it gets extinguished. I’m lucky because the love that started in this borough never died. In fact, it grew so big and wide that it turned into new connections, beautiful friendships, and even this gorgeous partnership I get to have with Ashley.
Seeds were planted, and some of them grew because of what we all were able to create together in this place. Others have spread. Into loving families and creative projects and beautiful partnerships, all because of conversations and connections and dreams that took shape in tiny apartments and summer rooftops and long walks between shutdown train stations.
The biggest surprise of this trip is how my feelings for Brooklyn, its beauty, and undeniable vibe have only become more affectionate. I still recognize some things—things I know I couldn’t have lived with. But no matter how difficult it was when I lived there, broke and searching for myself, there’s no place like it. And there never will be.
Even though it’s not my home, even if it is another 12 years before I see it again, I’ve never stopped loving Brooklyn. Those 48 hours felt like a long-awaited confirmation that it loved me back. I had no idea I needed to feel that, but it turns out I did.
They were sticky seeds, even in all that concrete. We grew mad trees.
‘Tell Me Something Good’ is Tiffany’s column, where she shares her real-time reflections, unpopular opinions, and general sense-making of life’s chaos in the pursuit of the highest collective good. Free to all subscribers of The Landline.
Mm mmm good reading! 🤌🏾