Just call me Hana.

What struck me most in this New York Magazine article about why New Yorkers can’t be (or don’t want to be) happy is the writer’s reference to the closing lines of The English Patient.

“In the last paragraph of The English Patient, Hana, the protagonist, stands alone in her house and, because her hair flies in her eyes, accidentally knocks a glass from the cupboard. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Kip, the man she loves, catches a fork an inch off the ground, similarly brushed off the dinner table by his daughter. Some of us are Hanas. Some of us are Kips.”

I know some people who are Kips and one in particular whose name I won’t mention here. He has an uncanny ability of living his life with as little worry and consequence to the world the around him as possible. Me, I’m a Hana. Call it luck or fate or chance or whatever it is you believe and ask yourself why is it that certain people catch their falling glasses and some people can’t seem to ever stop them from breaking.

And it’s not that I don’t want to be happy, but I don’t know the components to my own S+C+V= H equation. Is happiness really formulaic? Or is it as Milan Kundera writes, that happiness is the longing for repetition? Who knows, but this is coming from a man who wrote a book about two people whose entire romance is based on a string of chance events and coincidences.
Maybe this city really is too big of a place to be happy in. You come here and feel at first like you’re part of the city’s plan. That is until you realize that getting to where you want to be is going to be harder than you thought, and walking down 6th Ave. you pass at least two dozen people who all embody little parts of the person you’re trying to be. Everyone comes here to get somewhere else, to get a better job or a better apartment, a better boyfriend, a better life. But is the constant quest for something better leaving us unable to appreciate the things we already have thus leaving us all (gasp!) unhappy?

Who knows. But New York draws a certain kind of person and those people aren’t settlers. You don’t come to New York with no money in your pocket just to find yourself a nice little 9-5er with coffee breaks and a cushy vacation package. You don’t come to New York to keep being the person you were before you came here. You don’t come to New York with your high school girlfriend to settle down. You come to New York to find your own happiness and hope every day as you walk to the subway that perhaps this is the day it’s going to find you - no matter how many glasses you break.