Sunbleacht

  • Golden-something

    “Your 20s are your golden years,” they say.

    But no one tells you how hard it is to find something shimmering when you’re busy digging for your own spark in the dark. So I did what any slightly delusional twenty-one year old girl with a passport and a gut feeling might do — I crossed the ocean. By some cosmic joke (and a decent application), I found my way into NYU as a visiting student. Two suitcases, one overstuffed dream, and a soft spot for chaos later, I landed in the city that had haunted me since that May afternoon in 2024, when I first stood on the Brooklyn Bridge and watched the skyline burn gold. But January has no patience for nostalgia. New York in winter is a frozen rush — steel air, slushed streets, and people sprinting from one overheated room to the next like it’s a survival sport. Still, I laced up my cherry red Doc Martens and stepped out of my comfort zone. You don’t meet anyone by staying in a shoebox-sized room with overpriced Ikea furniture. That’s how I ended up on Mercer Street, chatting with a girl named Alisia – warm, bubbly, and entirely cool-girl-coded. She became my first real friend in the city. And for the first time, I thought: maybe I’ll actually make it through this. 

    Five months in, I’d battled my way through New York’s freeze and found a gang of girls who weren’t just surviving. They were thriving. And not in that fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of way. These women are sharp, driven, and unapologetically creative. They didn’t just remind me of who I was, they mirrored who I wanted to become. Ambitious without apology. Artsy without the eye-roll. Successful on their own terms.

    Back home in Germany, my dreams always felt… too much. Too loud. Too unrealistic. The kind of things people pat you on the head for before telling you to “be reasonable.” But here, I found people who didn’t just get it — they expected it. I was no longer the odd one out. I was part of a rhythm, a community where ideas weren’t just entertained, they were built on. Somehow, my hopes, my drive, and the messy contradictions of my personality all found a room to stretch out in, with the doors wide open and no one asking me to tone it down. I floated between those doorways: from university halls, to late-night kitchen talks in friends’ flats, to long solo walks in Central Park with my headphones blasting “Runaway” by Bon Jovi.  

    In between all that floating, I built a routine that finally felt like mine. No rules, no compromises, just doing what I want, when I want, surrounded by people who make space for my chaos. Suddenly, the barista at the coffee shop around the corner knows my order, the cashier at the supermarket across the street asks about my day, my neighbours invite me for a glass of wine, I have occasional chats over dinner with my roommates and somehow I became a regular. I walk differently now, not by pace –I’ve always been a fast walker — but by confidence, by the way I smile at strangers, by the way I mastered the small-talk game and by not shrinking at every strange outburst or siren. So when friends fly in from Germany and ask if I’m excited to go home, I grin.  “I am home,” I tell them. And for once, it’s not a line. It’s the truth. 

    Suddenly, time shifted from “See you in summer!” to “See you in a few weeks…” Every time these words cross my lips, I feel a strange knot in my stomach. But I shake it off. No time for nostalgia when I’m still in the middle of the thing I’ll soon miss. No time to mourn a version of life I’m still living. Still, there’s one day I keep circling in my head like it’s a checkpoint: twenty-two on the twenty-second. My golden birthday. Fitting, isn’t it? After months of chasing sparks, bruising my ego, rebuilding my voice, and talking to strangers who somehow became constants, I get a day dipped in gold. A little poetic justice. 

    I have always dreamed of popping a champagne bottle on a rooftop with a group of international girls, the girls who taught me how to be bold and soft at once. A toast to our golden years and a golden city that brought us all together. 

    Maybe these are the golden years. Not because everything is perfect, but because we’re finally brave enough to live imperfectly. To chase things that scare us. To fall in love with cities, with chaos, with versions of ourselves we hadn’t met yet. I didn’t find gold in some glittering life plan or perfect timeline. I found it in the quiet click of becoming in a city that never promised to hold me, but did anyway. If this is what golden-something looks like… I’ll take it.

  • You Should be a Night Walker

    I was sixteen when I stepped into a nightclub for the first time.

    Rumor had it that there was a multi-story bar on Hubbard Street in my hometown of Chicago where you didn’t need an ID to get in — just slip the bouncer some cash. Word got around, leapfrogging from friend group to friend group, as juicy information tends to do among high schoolers in the city.

    One Saturday night, instead of doing my pre-calculus worksheets or finishing an essay on The Great Gatsby, I lined up with some friends on the sidewalk, still damp and darkened from that afternoon’s rainfall. One by one, we faced the imposing bouncer dressed in all black, who asked for our IDs. Just like we’d practiced, each of us silently shoved our cash into his hand. After a few nervous moments that felt like an eternity, he moved to the side and waved us in.

    Just like that, my cohort graduated from house parties in Lincoln Park to the nightclubs of River North.

    Now, let’s be clear: if I were a parent and found out my sixteen-year-old was out clubbing, I would short-circuit, to say the least. Luckily, sixteen-year-old me told my parents I was at my friend Sasha’s, who conveniently lived a block from the club. When I quietly snuck back home two hours later, slightly tipsy, they were none the wiser.

    I spent countless weekends immersed in this nocturnal world with my friends. We weren’t particularly adventurous, as the nightlife offerings were understandably limited at our age. Relegated to college dive bars and the scummiest of nightclubs who didn’t care who they let in, we traipsed through every dance floor and made it our own. I felt like I had stumbled into a secret world.

    The vampiric, nocturnal landscape of nightlife took on a far different form when I arrived in New York City. In high school, I had come to understand bars and clubs as a seedy leisure activity. A guilty pleasure. It certainly wasn’t admirable — it was a frivolous time-waster that promised trouble equal to its weight in entertainment value.

    New York taught me that that was all wrong.

    Nightlife rewards good people skills and good judgment. The ability to let loose and dance like you don’t take yourself too seriously, but also stay firmly and respectably in control. Know how to talk to people, and know not to take the drugs they give you. Learn not to kiss every boy who wants you.

    Clubland was a career starter for some. RuPaul and Amanda Lepore. Patricia Field and Susanne Bartsch. Some of the Club Kids of the 80s stayed in the nightlife scene, while others branched into television or fashion using the social networks they formed at boîtes and soirees across downtown watering holes. A guy I went out with for a few months (and whom I semi-sneeringly nicknamed “Mr. Blonde” in early installments of my nightlife column) told me he met the modeling agent who would eventually “discover” him, as well as the executive who promptly hired him as an Assistant Editor at a New York culture magazine, at a weekly party he religiously attended on the West side. 

    In my vampiric world, I encounter people who lead polar opposite lives from mine. Creatures whom I would have never met under the light of the sun — only when the moon is out do our lives have a chance to intertwine. They work in Midtown or SoHo; I go to school in the Village. They live in Williamsburg; I have a dorm in Gramercy. After five p.m. they make music in their friend’s brownstone or do photoshoots and fashion styling for magazines. After five, I sit in the park or take the 6 Train home to write or nap. They’ve lived here for years upon years. I’m on my second — in a city big enough that our paths might never have crossed otherwise. But each night, we all implicitly know where the party is.