It is not, really, as stunning as it ought to be. Picking my way through other harried pedestrians heading to work, stepping out from the Q train to Union Square station, scanning until I find my exit, making my way out through the turnstiles, to the street above –- I move tentatively around this new city, into this life that is apparently still mine.
In a way it feels rather unmomentous. Easy, even. The city hasn’t turned its cold shoulder to me too badly yet. I’m waiting, but patiently, and not expecting much. Neither of myself, nor of the city. Unlike when I visit, I feel no pressure to live up to the city’s mythology, to test the city or myself. The city is indifferent to my opinion of it. Up til now, I have spent my life so far in cities I’ve emphatically loved and defended, cities I felt needed me and my love. At the same time the city isn’t testing me. Or perhaps it hasn’t noticed me. And it is indifferent, in a way, to itself – to how ugly we make it, how dirty, how littered, how full of chain stores. It will always be New York. The ugliness and the dirt are part of the point.
And in a way, it frees me, too. I don’t fret so when it’s ugly. I don’t wish the eyesores could be edited out, because that might make the visitors like it better, might justify their interest in this place as a Destination.
So far, the surface of the city exists in little pockets in my mind, separated by miles of dark subway tunnel.
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