Leaving New York City. It seems that everyone is either talking about how they want to do it or writing their manifesto on why they did it and then talking about that. Everyone’s reasons are different, but they all share one thing in common: the need to write about it. Mallory Ortberg, a young writer, has penned her “leaving New York” essay for The Toast, and the reason will be familiar to anyone who’s lived here long enough: there are just too many damn wizards nowadays:
Sure, the apartment’s rent-controlled, but the rent is controlled by another damn wizard. One month I have to pay him in rubies held in the mouth of a robin; the next I have to fight through a Minotaur maze in order to bring him the scent of freshly baked bread. My relationship with New York City has been a love affair, but that love affair has been broken by a forgetting spell, almost certainly cast by Ró the Black-Nailed, who is an enemy of love in all its forms and is particularly adept at casting memory spells.
OK fine, so Ortberg technically didn’t live here. And a lot of that probably didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean the essay doesn’t feel true, or that it won’t be one day. So read it and remember a day when you could walk down the street without dodging lightning bolts or being turned into a wolf.