An Atlas of Vanishing Places

Where do you find the life you once lived when the places you lived it are gone?

Huertas closed; this won’t mean much unless you also frequented the Basque bistro on 7^th street and First Avenue in Manhattan’s East Village. If you sat with your husband or wife, foreheads touching, at a high top looking out the window at the people hustling up and down the avenue, you might feel the same heartbreak I do. Where were those people going? Wherever it was, they were going there urgently and we were not, pausing instead to eat little pickled sardines skewered onto toothpicks beside briny olives, letting the hours that we wrongly assumed were a prelude to decades stretch around us. I’d sneak sips out of Jake’s glass of happy-hour red vermouth when mine was empty and he’d remind me that, for only $5, I could get another. But it tasted better coming from his glass.

We’ve not been there since before Covid, and before my husband’s cancer and the removal of his entire tongue rendered most restaurants irrelevant, thought we meant to go back. We meant to go back, and we tried to go back, and in this moment it’s clear that we can never go back.

The Welsh have a word for this —“Hiraeth”:  a longing for a home to which you cannot return. Biological systems relentlessly turn over their cells; urban systems relentlessly turn over their buildings and businesses.

There’s a lot about our decade in New York that I can’t remember by the year. I think that happens as you get older and scheduled milestones, like changing school grades, drop off. Those milestones structure us: What year did I first read Lord of the Rings? I couldn’t tell you outright, but it was assigned by my 8^th grade English teacher, so it must have been circa 1996. I won my first speech and debate tournament junior year, so about 1999. I kissed Blake behind the playground swings in 5^th grade, 1993, and I remember thinking it was kind of gross, and boys probably did have cooties, until one of them changed my mind in 7^th grade (1995).

With age, reminders of time are more irregularly spread out and less frequent, since they tend to be associated with major life events: births, deaths, the date the person you love is diagnosed with cancer, the date they’re diagnosed again, the date you marry that person the night before his massive surgery, unsure if that’s the last night you’ll see him alive. Those dates we remember—the details of those days in stark relief to the stretches of stable, placid-but-good years that blur into one another.

When did we first go to Huertas, starting a weekly tradition that would bleed across the years? I can’t recall. I remember it was winter, money was tight, and our apartment had only one living room window, which is to say we were freezing, not fiscally flush, and a little stir crazy—not a great recipe for relational harmony. “A short walk,” “cheap,” and “not inside our apartment” were wonderful metrics for a culinary adventure. Plus, I had a Groupon.

The time Jake and I spent in New York City, which is to say, the majority of our years together—certainly, the freest, most unencumbered years—I recollect less as a timeline and more as a proportional symbol map. When we were looms much larger in importance then where we were. In “The dangerous of walking include falling in love,” I wrote:

If walking marks time and thought, then our story should be told in steps, like a book’s narrative moves forward with each page turn. Forget chronology, maybe all narrative arcs are really maps; all love stories are cartographies of the heart.

The places that Jake and I kept returning to, and where we lived so much of our story, tell a tale of us much more clearly than any chronology. These places¹ represent, to me, both who we were and, as memories blur, proof we were there at all. So it’s especially difficult now, when Jake’s existence in the world is acutely threatened, to see those places disappear. I know it’s the natural of way of things, like animals eating one another, but I can’t help but feel the loss of the habitat Jake and I once knew.

Jake and I haven’t returned to New York together, to visit our old lives, since 2021. Last May we’d planned a homecoming to celebrate Jake completing his first surgery and radiation, which were supposed to be curative. Instead of flying to New York, however, a cancer recurrence transformed May 25, 2023 from the day we flew home into the day Jake’s tongue was surgically removed, forever sundering Jake’s connection to our old life (as he wrote: “The old me died on the table. The new me is still being born, and may not wholly be born”).  Still, I imagined us returning to New York one day. New York, being New York, would still be there. Maybe no longer belonging to us, but us still belonging to it.

When the aggressive tumor molted into at least four new tumors  in July 2023, Jake understood that he’d been sentenced to death. He spoke of Manhattan as a fantasy we’d return to if there’s an afterlife, Jake waiting for me to meet him at the corner outside our old apartment so we could walk down First Avenue together, hand in hand. But, to our shock, clinical trials have kept Jake alive for a year, albeit at the cost of many side effects. His tumors had even been stable on the trial drug Petosemtamab for almost six months when, on March 1, I returned to work. Bills needed (and still need) paying, and maintaining health insurance is especially important right now. On that day, I believed that Jake would keep on living for a while. We could risk a dollop of normalcy. Then, in a further uncharacteristic act of optimism, and because my job schedules our ER shifts three months in advance, I requested a few days off in mid-June, between scheduled Petosemtamab infusions, when we could finally return to New York together.

June! What hubris. I booked the tickets in early March, indulging, however tentatively, the wild hope that we might go, giving into the tiny, dangerous part of me, that, despite the likely odds, expects Jake to keep surviving, because he’s already managed it this long. “What if?” I wondered. Our return might not be triumphant, exactly, pocked as it would be with exhaustion and pain, but at least it’d be corporeal. I didn’t want to take that walk in some fantastical afterlife. I want more of this life. We’re not yet spent.

Two weeks later, on March 14, CT scans showed Jake’s tumors had grown by 20%. He needed a new trial. June became as unstable as Jake: a new drug might not work or cause debilitating side effects; Jake might die before we could even find out.

All human stories are stories of loss. There’s a beautiful room in the main branch of the New York Public Library housing a collection of almost half a million maps that tells these tales. You can sit there all afternoon and look at topographies of extinct countries, the urban transformation of cities, and atlases of vanishing places. I’m reminded of those movies where the human race is extinct and the earth takes back the big cities. Forests bisect bridges, vines and mosses creep over skyscrapers, as the Anthropocene era ends.²How many other places in a city that is changing too slowly in many ways, but rapidly in others, will disappear and take Jake’s and my history with it? One of our other favorite restaurants, Back40, was the site of birthdays and anniversaries—and it closed years ago. So did the little wine shop we’d walk to on Thursday nights, bringing home-baked pastries to the tasting in exchange for a larger pour.

Watching the places where Jake and I found one another vanish makes me worry that when there’s nowhere left for us, there will be nothing left of us. That I’ll lose those parts of myself if I can’t revisit the places we lived them after he’s gone.

Archaeologists can find the remnants of past civilizations from space. So I log onto Google street view, the need to see our old lives—even digitally— feels urgent. As the pictures load, I can still see our stories on the streets, even if new stories have sprung up where we made them. Photos of strangers walking the streets that we walked, creating the maps of their own lives upon our past steps, sweep by as I click our way further down First Avenue. Like millions of others, we’re the ghosts of the City’s pasts. We haunt what’s left, what isn’t, haunts us.

The German word “Fernweh” is the future-tense version of the Welsh “Haereth”: a longing for a place you’ve never been to. The literal English translation is “far-sore” or a longing for distant places. Farsickness. An ache for unknown places and unknown lands. Technically, wanderlust, but I think, also, a lust for a future you wanted to explore but never will. A future in a place, a future with a person. No place feels more distant that the future I imagined for Jake and myself. It’s a land I imagined in a thousand different ways, in great detail, none of which are reachable.  A map that can never disappear because it never existed.

Shortly after Jake’s second recurrence, when we thought death was imminent, Jake chose a memorial bench in Stuyvesant Square Park, in lieu of a gravestone. You can sit there, he said to me, in the park near our old apartment, and drink a coffee from Saltwater and read a book from the little free library that’s beside the bench, then, at 4pm you can walk the ten blocks to happy hour at Huertas and it’ll be like I’m with you. Except that Huertas is gone, too.

It’ll be hard returning to New York one day without Jake, but harder still if the places that once welcomed us, aren’t there to welcome me back. I hadn’t realized just how much I’ve been clinging to the idea that I’ll sit at our high-top, taste the croquetas we ate together, and smell the red vermouth we drank together, those senses uniquely triggering episodic memories in a way nothing else can, memories so evocative it’s as if they’re a waking dream during which Jake can briefly return to me again. Proust had his madeleines. I’d have my tapas.

When Jake’s cancer returned in July 2023, I stopped anticipating all the things we’d do “one day” and became acutely aware of each moment’s potential as a “last time:” will this be the last time he tells me he loves me? The last time we read side-by-side? The last time we go on a walk? Impending doom changes the shape of the hours, putting awful pressure on each day. When we go to sleep, will he still be breathing in the morning? When I go to work, will I come home to find him alive and breathing? Did he hear me say, “I love you?” Should I go for another kiss?

I hadn’t considered last places. After Jake’s gone, I’ll find new places, yet I don’t believe they’ll replace the longing that I’ll feel for the places we’ve been and the places we’ll never get to. They won’t replace the strange sensation of longing I already have for exactly where we are right now, knowing “now” can’t last: Jake behind me in the kitchen checking on the soup in the slow cooker, me at the little desk in the common room typing, our reflections together, in the dark window.

If you’ve gotten this far, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding my husband Jake’s ongoing cancer treatment.

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1. Besides Huertas, they might include Taim falafel, Saltwater Coffee, Everyman Espresso, Think Coffee, The L train, A particular house on Troutman street in Bushwick, Veselka, Union Square, Back 40, Masha and the Bear , Meadowsweet, Xixa, Raines Law Room, Pouring Ribbons, the list goes on…

2. Deceleration tragically wins.