Meet Me in the Park

On small moments of love that lie solely within a New York City park. 

By Sayuri Govender

Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina

In each of the parks around campus are pockets of us—people-watching with our neighbors, sharing inside jokes, and breathing out with the trees. I have dozens of different trail loops memorized, and I know exactly which one I need when. For a long, contemplative moment, I’ll walk down to the bend near 99th where Riverside Park meets the Hudson River. For a picnic on a warm day, underneath the big tree between the track in Great Hill in Central Park. For a slow-paced stroll with my friends, the circle around the baseball field in Morningside. As I built these memories and instincts in each park, without even noticing, I was creating a sense of home. 

When I went abroad last spring in Granada, Spain, I was struck by the feeling that the self I built in New York may not slot neatly into this foreign landscape. To find solace in familiarity, I went searching for parks. Yet, in the single park I discovered on the edge of the city, I was never able to truly find grounding, that outpouring of love I thought was intrinsic to the space. Under dry palm trees, white stone, and the thick desert flora, I thought about both what I missed and what I would return to back home. I missed the blooming of the cherry blossoms in April and the picnic I would have underneath it with my friends, the quiet respite of the Conservatory Gardens and its hushed fountain, the loud joy of soccer games at Riverside, and watching the birds play in the leftover rain under Morningside’s staircase. I missed the ease of never needing a map but still being able to explore new paths—of sharing moments of love over and over again. 

Central Park

All at once I am little again, tucked within the Great Big Hill.

A few times each semester, my mom comes in for lunch. This time, we got tuna melts at a deli and climbed a long hill to get to the Great One. We sat in the center of the grass in the sunny patch, watching everyone soak in the last bits of summer. As I talked about my plans for the semester, a childlike confession bubbled within me. I knew that I was about to be dumped, and I didn’t know what to do. My mom and I never really talk about things like this, but I needed her then. Shaking off the awkwardness, I spilled everything out to her—all the tensions and strains I had held for months, all the times I made myself small, and how it was coming to its shaky end now. She listened thoughtfully and carefully. And then she said to me: Sayuri, there is someone out there who will appreciate you for exactly who you are—for your affection, your love, your joy. Those are the best things about you. You cannot dull a single part of that for anyone else. 

I nodded slowly. I was quiet like a kid, holding in hot tears. I knew this was the sharp truth I had been avoiding. And, just as she said, I stopped dulling it. 

Riverside

When I find myself crushed like icy snow, I take it to the river.

When I was confronted with my first crumbling of a doomed fantasy, I knew to find solace in Riverside’s fresh cherry blossoms after a sudden heartbreak. I knew to go where the river touched the walkway because she had once led me there. I only made eye contact with dogs on that walk. I was small like an animal. I wrote in a journal and tucked fallen petals between the pages. I stole this moment to conceptualize the strangeness of the sudden sinking of romance. The water cooled me. The air was fresh with spring. People were biking up and down the paths in front of me. My invisibility, guaranteed by their speed and unrelenting forward gaze, was respite. In the presence of many, there was the beauty of my solitude. I let myself sit for a while. Like a crocus or daffodil, the signaling of newness was right under my feet. I just had to let myself notice it. 

A few months later, I went to Riverside with a receding heartache. This time, I walked with my roommate Isa. We were practicing speaking Spanish before my semester abroad in Spain. I was pretending I understood her more than I could, responding with elementary phrases that we laughed at, her saying I sounded like her little cousins. (I kept saying different iterations of ¡¡guauuuu super mega mas palo!! at large fallen tree branches to make her laugh). We joked about our semester of breakups. It was easy to laugh now, with December approaching and the next year on the horizon. Yet, she still gently held all the things I told her the night it happened. She was the first person who knew—I woke her up at 2 a.m. from her bed on the other side of our room, in tears, saying nothing. She held me like an older sister and repeated, you’re okay, it’s okay, you’re okay.

Morningside  

In need of a break, I meet my best friends on the sunnied spot across from the singing willow tree 

One evening, I met Mira halfway through the park. We were reuniting after spending a whole semester away from each other. I felt disoriented. I was seeing the friend I had missed for months when we were abroad, but our reunion also marked the end of our lives in wildly different places—instantly transforming that time into nostalgic memories. On my way to her, I saw a series of faces that would grow familiar as the summer went by—old aunties swinging their arms as they walked in a visor, dog walkers with six big dogs attached to their hip, and a new mom pushing her baby in a stroller. I thought about the new sense of confidence I developed the semester before. Would it all be lost, now back in a place so different from where I bloomed? Suddenly, this familiar space was once again new. When I met Mira, we talked incessantly about what we missed from our time abroad, she in Copenhagen and me in Granada. I told her about how we spent our days drinking cold Cokes in the plaza, strolling through the old city to catch the sunset over the Alhambra, and gossiping in Lorca Park. She told me about cold plunging head first into the river and then drying off in the nearby sauna, the Danish dice game she learned, and how her friends always made her dinner. But the one thing we both really missed was The New York Park. I missed the smoke and laughter from barbecues on the lawns, the collective buzz before outdoor concerts or baseball games, the shared joy of sneaking a walk once the hot summer air was cooled by a midday downpour, and the rare sense of stillness within the movement of the city. More than that, I missed sharing it with our best friends. 

…

Months later, during the unofficial end of the summer, Ceci told me to meet her in Morningside. We had just moved in for the last time, and I was terrified of all the things I needed to do. I knew she would make me feel better, just as she had since we were in elementary school. I descended the stairs and tried to spot her from a distance. She was sitting on the last sunny bench to my left, sprawled over the seat with her notebook open and her earbuds in. I hugged her closely and snuggled into her side. We talked for hours about our expectations for the last year of college, how our parents were doing, what we last journaled about, and how grateful we were to go to school together. This time, it was silently flush with the knowledge that this was the last semester we could say that after 16 years. It was this singular friendship with her that had continuously comforted me, lifted me, and pushed me. Our hearts full, we wrapped our arms around each other and headed home. 

Federico Garcia Lorca Park 

Stilled by an unexpected love, I wonder how to balance new desire with homesick yearning. 

In Granada, there’s Federico Garcia Lorca park. It is the biggest park in the city. It houses the historic summer home of the poet (not to be confused with his childhood home, or his birthplace, each memorialized in nearby towns.). I thought about the irony of our reverse journeys, Lorca going to study abroad at Columbia, and me to Granada—both of us struck by strange new solitude and a desire to find the familiar.

My friends and I trekked to the edge of the city to lay in the bends on the sides of the sandy paths. We took a blanket and defiantly laid in the grass—a place clearly meant just for decor. In these makeshift grass beds were the first places that made me feel at home. This is how I used the parks back at home. This was also the place where I started to fall in love.  

She and I would rush after class to hide out there. On a 5 euro couch cover we used as a blanket, we would talk for hours. In our bubbling infatuation, I asked her about the places she frequented at Brown, her secret alcoves, what made her feel homesick. In that hot sun, I told her how I ached for the dark green fullness of New York parks—the ponds that offered reflection by the water, the paths filled with bright sound and laughter of my best friends, the ledges where I felt my heart thrum with a crush, the subsequent sink of heartbreak, and then be eased by familial warmth. And I promised my girl, who loves nothing more than walking around, that I’d take her there soon. 

…

A few months later, I did. We went to the weekly Jazz performance in Morningside Park, the cafe in Riverside, and all the way up and down to the North Woods, Conservatory Garden, and Sheep Meadow. One morning, she woke up earlier than me to go run in Central Park. When she came back, she was sparkling with it. What a dream! She told me, with the pure joy of getting to  be like all the other New Yorkers, waking up early to go run in the park and be momentarily, yet deliberately, with each other.