Nine months and five days

I lived exactly nine months and five days in New York.

In 2009, after finishing my music course in Boston, my student visa entitled me to a year of OPT (optional practical training) in a place of my choice, within the United States. I chose New York.

After a few days of intense searching, I finally found an apartment for me and two other schoolmates in Brooklyn on the J line. It was also the New York of movies, but of gang movies.

I had been dating an Italian boy for five years and we had agreed that he would come to me the following year, when he finished the course. At that time we would find a smaller house just for us. Everything seemed perfect. I was in love and living in the city of my dreams.

I started looking for work. I offered myself as: a music teacher, a teacher of Portuguese for foreigners, a voice teacher, a songwriter teacher and a guitar teacher. Nothing. A higher education course does not count as experience. But how did they expect me to have experience if they didn’t let me try it? The weeks quickly came together into a month and I started to get desperate. No one answered me, and the few who did, wanted someone with a minimum of five years working in the area. I decided to expand the research. I offered myself as: babysitter, translator, maid and kitchen helper. Nothing. This time, not only did I have no experience, but I lacked references. I still had some money aside to pay the rent for that month, but not the next month.

In a week when I was starting to consider going to the gang street to sell my body, my boyfriend called me to inform me that not only would he not come to live with me, but he would also no longer be my boyfriend.

I cried on almost every street in New York. It was my first great love, and when the first love ends, it takes with it the hope of someday living another one. I forced myself every day to wake up early, open the curtains, send emails and go outside. That and the dramatic side of me of imagining myself in an American movie, crying in disgust through the streets of one of the most emblematic cities in the world. No one ever stopped to ask me if I was okay. One of the best features of that city is also the worst: no one cares.

A few weeks later I saw an ad on a website. They were looking for waiters for a French café in the Financial District. For the first and only time in my life, I lied on a resume. Experience? Yes, at the café “Bolinhos da avó” in Lisbon (totally fictitious location). Contact? Of course! Mrs. Amelia’s (my mother’s number). I got the job. I tried not to listen to the feeling of guilt and focus only on a wonderful phrase I learned there: “Fake it until you make it”. Shortly afterwards I also got a weekly gig in an Italian restaurant where I sang jazz and bossa nova standards and, a few weeks later, another in a Turkish restaurant.

I returned to Portugal seven months later, when I received an invitation from a label to record my first album. It wasn’t an easy decision, but I wanted to sing my songs and not standards for the rest of my life.

Even today I see New York as the scene of my first heartbreak. Today I know that in the process of falling in love with her, I fell out of love with him. I just didn’t come back with a mug saying “NY I LOVE YOU”, because we are not the type of couple who make public displays of affection.