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Where do you go when you want to see the world?

What do you pursue when you want it all?

Where can you rip yourself open and start again any time you want?

And if you want to do that more than average person; start anew, bare your soul, your guts, your slithering sins born of shameful vulnerabilities, where do you belong?

I don’t rightfully know, but here we all are in New York City.

And here I go…

Here I go walking down the streets amongst the mountainous towers of industry that can be seen across the river, not giving them a second glance.

Here I go to parties I’d have died to get into less than a decade ago, drinking it in only to find the sediment of dive bars that I’d pooled into in my twenties staring back at me from the bottom of my glass. Wee hours, barely congealed by the bar, laughing with friends who knew me - know me still. My aching feet are what bring me back, bitterly, to the fancy now.

Here I go to Vermont, and Beacon, and Boston, and Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, and Europe at every opportunity. I don’t worry about New York in my absence. I don’t care what it does.

Here I go. I can feel it. I’m shaking my head at the girl in the Brooklyn bookshop a six years ago, eyes alight with the magic of it all, flipping idly through Goodbye to All That, refusing to pay money she doesn’t have to get it because she’ll never want to leave this land of blinding opportunity. She knows better, she was made for this. She’s not wrong, but she’s not right. I order the book discounted on Amazon because the magic of stumbling upon a bookstore doesn’t exist any longer when surrounded entirely by concrete.

She’s right to think she was made for this, though. She is, I was. My legs have carried me time and again over the Williamsburg Bridge, when I decided (oddly) that I could walk off a trying heartbreak by committing to an hour walk each evening. It was time-consuming and often sticky-hot in the summer’s dusk, but it worked. My life, heart, and mind changed in tiny increments over many months along the filthy footpath of that bridge. Suspended above the East River I breathed in specks of emotional clarity until I was changed, down to my cells. I don’t believe that exists elsewhere in the world, but it probably does.

Film brought me to New York. I dreamed in celluloid, in cigarette burns, in heroines of their own stories hustling down Second Avenue at a clip too aggressive for their stilettoed boots. I was convinced they, like me, were running headlong into their future and determined to look chic while doing so. It wasn’t until I became them that I realized no one does that unless the only chic, Manhattan thought in their chic, Manhattan head is, “Oh fuck, I am about to get fucking fired.”

Film brought me there, but literature served as the adhesive under my feet upon arrival. Books kept me glued to each borough I wandered through. Reading Blue Nights under an indigo sky in Father Demo Square, sinking my teeth into Bright Lights, Big City and reading about McInerney’s protagonist ambling toward Charlton and Spring Streets as i did the same, having Unorthodox shared amongst my roommates right off of Kent Ave in Brooklyn - it all made me what I wanted more than anything to be: a character worth writing about. My youthful, wayward actions imbued with cultural importance.

I scheduled time with myself in coffee shops on every weekend for six months straight. I set up my computer, alongside so many faceless others, and got halfway through stories and scripts and poems before realizing I had nothing to say to anyone besides myself. I had curated a protagonist for an audience of one, and even as I pulled double duty as both author and reader I was bored. So, I spent the subsequent six months getting out of my comfort zone. Until this point, my comfort zone was smack-dab in an overworked, over-scheduled existence, searching ceaselessly for what’s next, unenthused with the ladder rung in my grasp and reaching upward toward the sensible next step. I didn’t consider climbing down so much as jumping to a new ladder entirely, trusting blindly that it was there, somewhere in the dark.

I travelled, I ate alone, I carried a notebook with me and worried less about creating and more about observing. I found that the world comes to you when it’s ready, not necessarily when you open the door to invite it in, and it’s the time between those two events that build character. I tracked my strengths and flaws, likes and dislikes, love of analyzing the past and comfort I find in not having control over the future, the odd security of the present moment, and the certainty that where you are located has less and less to do with who you are the more willing you become to seek strange horizons.

New York has slowly become the backdrop for fewer “once in a lifetime” events, and more the setting of memorable afternoons spent splayed on the grass of Prospect Park with a book, listening to the conversations of the surrounding protagonists of their own stories. I see romance blossoming feebly all around me, wondering if they know what I didn’t. That the ring wrapped snug around the finger on my left hand, shining in the light, is a promise not only to build a home together, but to go home together. I wonder if I had expected the sighing relief that came along with the words, let’s get out of here, until I heard them, felt them melt something in my spine I once thought was steel.

New York City gave me everything, I won’t deny it. It laid the world bare at my feet, demanded goals be set, then chirped, “What’s next, then?” with every victory or defeat. It didn’t let me wallow, there was no time for that. It gave and it gave until I stood beside the life I’d imagined for myself, then it gave some more and I was inside before I knew it, living the things I’d visualized on bus trips back and forth so many years earlier. It gave me a view of the world outside all the things I knew I wanted to be and, gradually, a better sense of myself than I knew I possessed.

The really incredible thing about this city is, once it’s done with you, it can cast you off like a threadbare coat. We all know that going in and take our chances anyhow. The incredible thing that no one tells you is that you can do the same to it. New York City can be shrugged out of, unceremoniously, and left in the coat room at Babbo for all eternity.

But even now I don’t like to think of the city that way, with all its glitter and grit. I think of it as a book with an intriguing cover. One I’ve read over and over, pulled magic from, briefly considered having a poignant line or two tattooed on my skin, then thought better of it, passed the book along to a friend, and left inspired to search for more magic elsewhere with newly honed perspectives.

Our magic (because it’s ours , not the city’s) comes with us. The fire inside burns when stoked appropriately, no matter where it’s placed. A well fed fire can burn through the rain. It might let you be seen through the dark, but its only true job is to illuminate the future as you march boldly toward it. I learned that in New York City.