[...] I woke up on January second, perhaps the dullest and most obligated day of the whole year, a living garbage pile topped by a discarded Christmas tree, and couldn’t breathe through my face. I went to the gym because I didn’t believe myself, and it took me nearly a week of dragging my body around the city, leaking and listing to the side like an old ship with a hole in it, to admit that I actually was sick. Surely I must be faking it. Surely I must want this, this excuse from class, this note that says I can stay home today, under the covers, with a mug of something warm, allowed to sit out this round of doing life, excused from getting up and walking myself to the next thing and the next. Surely I must want the sick day. And worse, some part of me did.

[...] A cold is really just being overworked and overextended, drinking too much and partying too much, generally not taking care of ourselves, the sneaky ways that depression manages to articulate itself as something more comprehensible. Because a cold is non-critical it feels, at least to me when I have one, like it has be about something other than itself, as though stuffed-up sinuses and a leaking face were just the container, just the form. The substance, the content, needs to be something else—not a cold, but an explanation. The cold must be about my flaws, my tendency to say yes to too many things, my eating habits, my laziness. Because a cold is so low-level as to not quite seem medical, it acts instead as a referendum on one’s whole lifestyle. We expect having a cold to have a thesis. There is so little to it that it has to somehow be more than itself.

[...] Colds are a referendum on how kind we can be to ourselves, how much we can let ourselves get away with, how small we can allow ourselves to be. They are also reminders of the large and overwhelming power of the systems that want us to be none of these things.

Every day there is some news story about someone who kept going to work through some horrible sickness, with a broken limb, through labor pains. We are supposed to find these stories inspiring. This particular tendency - to find the human willingness to break ourselves, the desperation that refuses kindness to one’s own body - to be somehow heroic, equated with both physical and moral strength, is not particular to our era. It is older and more insidious than that, deeper and harder to get at than the easy classification of millenial burnout. That burnout, or whatever name you want to give it, is real, but it is part of a vast and ancient idea that by destroying ourselves, by using ourselves up, we become holy and virtuous, guaranteed moral clarity, free from possible accusations of selfishness, clean as a bone and bathed in light. It is silly to think that there is nothing that does not reach back to an old and creaking and claw-fingered religion in our belief in the redemptive beauty of bearing up under suffering, of working through the pain.

This is the time of year to love New York if you are going to love it. Springtime in this city is a cheat code, an overripe and irresistible metaphor. The light is all at once kind, the afternoons that float into evening are longer, carrying in their slow blue hours the memory of every past springtime that brought this same collection of streets and stairs and corners back to life. Days arrive like color flooding into black and white movies. The avenues announce themselves in old-fashioned photographic splendor, lined up in the patterns of classical art, beauty easy to find.

It is not that it is more beautiful here than anywhere else at this time of year. It is beautiful, generally, in the world, in the spring. If I lived somewhere else, I would think that springtime there was the most beautiful thing each time it happened. It would renew my belief that this location, wherever it was, still had something hopeful and generative and particular to offer. Finding beauty in New York, or anywhere, is a survival mechanism. We focus on the shiny parts in order to convince ourselves that the difficulties are worth it. Beauty is always one kind of propaganda or another.

[...\ The places in which your life takes place, the places you love so radically, belong to wealthy corporations, to a tiny handful of families with unthinkably old money, to the Sacklers and their industry of death, to the Catholic Church, to NYU, to Google, to Donald Trump. We are borrowing our lives from people who disdain those lives, to whom we are at absolute best an inconvenience. Each inch of sidewalk, each welcoming shadow of a grand building, the air itself as it softens around you and turns siren-like and loving in spring, all of these are possessions; someone owns them, but it isn’t you.

To live in a city is to carve a very small story out of someone else’s much larger one, burrowing our skinless and unimportant daily events, our losses, our triumphs, our jokes and heartbreaks and errands and arguments, cancelled plans and chance reunions, forgivenesses and grudges, bargains and failures, into someone else’s massive narrative of wealth. One comfort is that this is the way it has always been, the skyscrapers versus the ground. This paradox of an essentially rented life may actually be the thing that gives a city meaning, but it is also the thing against which the city struggles. How possible is it to live in the quiet story, and how long until those lives become largely untenable, until the loud story is all that is left?

[...] After the exuberant dance scene where Laurie meets the March sisters and then helps them get home, there are two paired shots of Timothee Chalamet as Laurie, first standing awkwardly in the March house as its numerous women tumble and talk over each other around him, everything the color of firelight except him, and then outside, in the banked and silent snow, about to begin the very short walk home to his very much grander house, turning to look back at the place he just came from, which emanates warmth out into the winter night so palpable you could nearly feel it coming off the screen. That was the point where I started crying, and I basically didn’t stop for the rest of the movie.

Little Women is a book about longing to get inside someone else’s family. Laurie is all the only children who spent our time in high school at the homes of friends who had bigger, warmer, messier families, the lonely kids who were always looking to shoulder our way into someone else’s family, for whom love was a means of inclusion in a warm room in which we were not naturally welcome, and perhaps did not wholly belong. One thing this film gets right is the part of adolescence that is about always trying to get adopted by someone else, trying to find a family who will actively chose you. It is a movie about other people’s houses, and about the friend you had growing up whose house was always warmer — literally, temperature-wise — than yours, and the feeling at the late end of the night at a friend’s house when you didn’t want to leave, the dullness of returning to your own chilly, empty home. It is a movie about how both childhood and family are fictions, our own and other people’s.