on loving new york

…quite simply, i was in love with new york. i do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, i mean that i was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. i remember walking across sixty-second street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. i was late to meet someone but i stopped at lexington avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that i had come out out of the west and reached the mirage. i could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and i could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and i knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because i did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. i still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to new york, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
--joan didion

i grew up loving a new york that i had created out of movies and photographs and my grandparents’ stories about dancing at fordham parties, and when i finally moved here at 17 (a baby age!) it was too different from what i had needed it to be. so i came back older, maybe wiser, at 22 (still a baby age! such babies we were, we are), and grew to love a new new york, both better and harder than the one i had created, but so much more satisfying for it.

but my new york, the one i invented and the one i inhabit, is filled with this sense of possibility. it’s what keeps me here, on my toes, looking around the corner for the next magical opportunity.

sorry.

i took a bit of a hiatus. not for any good reason. just because i've been busy with life and stuff. (you know, life and stuff.)

here are the things i should have written about:

my parents came to visit. we went to museums and the ucb theater to see some improv and theater for a new audience to see some othello. we ate delicious food at otto and mexican radio and it was great to show them around town again.

our dear friend t came to visit. he and i walked over the brooklyn bridge and ate vegan cupcakes and went out for a friend's birthday on the lower east side. we took him to the city reliquary and the ucb theater to see some better improv, and it was grand.

a high school friend of mine came to visit new york, and we saw each other for the first time in a few years. we walked her and her boyf around park slope and took them to a record release party and out in williamsburg and she feel in love with bk.

we decided to move so we've been looking at apartments again (it's the most wonderful time of the year!)

it keeps pretending to be spring


and then it decides to be winter.


i promise to have more to say in the coming weeks.