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.