My Imaginary Life in Greenwich Village

I’m in a HomeAway sponsored vacation rental while in NYC. FYI.

I like vacation rentals because they allow me to migrate more easily into the fantasy that the place I’m visiting is actually my home. I can carry a bag of groceries up three flights to my temporary flat. I can have a neighborhood where people live, where bicycles are locked up on back balconies and my window looks not into an impersonal wall of hotel rooms, but into other apartments where dishes pile up on counters and conversations about work leak out into the weird narrow spaces between buildings.

There are three of us in this grand two bedroom flat near the corner of Bleecker and Cornelia. We have an impressive patio with a BBQ, we can fall out of the front door into a sushi bar, a row of Italian delis, a spectacular gelato place (“Did I read that right? Does that say 5.25 for a small!?!?!”). The Christopher Street subway station is two or three short blocks away, Washington Square Park, is just there, and a fountain plaza, I don’t know the name, is around the corner.

Last night we sat on our patio eating the aforementioned expensive gelato, watching the full moon appear from behind a thinning curtain of clouds. And this morning, we walked around the corner and into a coffee shop that, even with the lox platter on the menu, evoked Eugene, Oregon more than New York City, a mood not lessened by the Grateful Dead music on the PA. It was not lost on us, the amusing irony of three West Seattle Girls in New York finding their way directly to a place that could have been transported from the Pacific Northwest to the Village.

Familiar coffee shops aside, it is fun to toy with the idea of this perfect imaginary life. A nice walk up flat in an excellent neighborhood. A tiny kitchen because really, why bother cooking when there is such excellent food — and such variety right outside your front door? Late dinner, by our west coast standards, and early mornings because the trucks are unloading just outside. We have two bathrooms — it’s probably unimaginably expensive to have an apartment with that kind of luxury. But I imagine it anyway.

Two of us came in by train — me, wobbly and dizzy from what I’ll call “The Bad Juice Incident”, Kelly patient and directed. We talked about what it would be like to navigate that traffic everyday, striding through the massive swirl of crowds in Penn Station, traversing the vast underground maze at Times Square to find the right train going the right direction. How long, I wonder, in this imaginary life, does it take to get used to the crowds, the noise, the trips across town that take half an hour longer than you expect.

Because I’m not in the temporary mental state of a hotel room, I can sit here now,  drinking ginger ale and nursing my annoyingly delicate state while I pretend it’s my day off. Not far away, someone is hammering on a pipe; there is intermittent honking. My roommates are off sight-seeing, as I should be, I’m playing my “Let’s pretend” game alone for now. Of course I could not afford this place, a cursory search reveals a similarly configured condo for one million dollars. That’s four or five times my current mortgage.

But it is nice to imagine. I can see a church dome with a cross on top, I can look at the sky reflected in the big windows of the unit upstairs and to the left of the patio. I can walk around the corner into a place that serves risotto smothered in truffle oil and I can be astonished, again, by how charming and open the folks I interact with seem, these imaginary neighbors who make my coffee and bag my ginger ale and wish me a good day with a bright, right in the eyes smile. When I’m feeling 100% I can go all in, and maybe make a sandwich with bread from Amy’s and cheese from Murray’s and lettuce from the Fancy Grocery two blocks away. Even though it is far removed from a real existence, I can follow my sandwich with a cup of tea and think, “Yep, this is the life for me.”