I got deliciously lost in Astoria on Saturday and it fixed something in me I didn't know was broken.
Here's the backstory. My week was too much. Work, the goodbye at JFK, the cold coming in. By Friday I was a rubber band pulled all the way back. So Saturday I did the most radical thing a New Yorker can do: I made no plans.
I took the N to Astoria Boulevard with no destination and just walked. This is the whole secret to Astoria — it rewards aimlessness. You turn down 30th Avenue and there's a Greek bakery, then a Bangladeshi grocery, then a coffee place, then an old man playing backgammon outside a cafe like he's been there since 1974.
I bought a bougatsa, warm, powdered sugar everywhere, immediately down my front. I ate it walking, which is honestly the correct way to eat everything.
When you get lost in Astoria you keep stumbling into corners that feel like small countries stitched together. It reminded me of walking through the old city in Ahmedabad, where one lane smells like jalebi and the next one like a temple. That layered thing. That everyone-is-here thing.
I ended up at Astoria Park, by the water, under the RFK Bridge, watching people not doing anything. A group having a cookout, kids on scooters, a couple arguing softly in a language I couldn't place. The East River doing its slow silver thing.
I sat on a bench for an hour. No phone, mostly. Just being a person in a park.
The thing about deciding to get lost in Astoria is that it's the opposite of the rest of my New York life, which is all schedules and G-cals and being on time to things that don't matter. Out there I was on nobody's clock.
I took the N home as the sun went down, sugar still on my coat, and I felt rinsed clean. Some Saturdays you don't need a plan. You need a neighborhood generous enough to hold you while you have none.
Go somewhere with no map. Let the bakery decide.
Love,