Tuesday muse-day: a rambling love letter.

Featuring a photo I snapped of a couple reading on the subway, aka one of my favorites ever.

NYC DIARIES

Last June I went to New York for two weeks, alone, and fell into the kind of love that you never crawl out of.

It was hot and sticky and it took my Southern California self a few days to be able to walk to the subway without choking on the water in the air, but it was everything to me.

I remember that it poured summer rain that first night. Situated in the back if a brownstone, I had a garden view of what looked like a tropical oasis in the middle of Brooklyn. I can still hear the way thar it sounded, the way that it smelled. It was different than any rain that I had ever felt in California. I stared at it for so long that when I finally checked my phone, I was greeted with a series of angry voicemails from my grocery deliver. He had also been staring at the rain, but from the cold vantage point of my stoop with two soggy bags of heavy groceries. I remember running down the stairs, breathing in the lovely, musty odor, and unlocking the series of giant, charming doors before finally coming face to face with a very angry, very wet, man. The full trees of Brooklyn danced all around him, swaying violently as he yelled at me, quite theatrically, for not abiding by the relentless tempo of the city.

And there it was. My initiation. My big, glaring, “Welcome to New York”. Which is might as well have been “Welcome to Life”, for this is a city that runs on its own time, not yours. It will not stop for you and it will not hold your hand. It has always seemed all the more alive to me for that.

I spent the rest of that trip in a dream state. I would go out and get lost in the city during the day and come home at night to sit on the fire escape and overlook the gardens below. I would sit there and watch people’s whole lives unfold behind tall windows, never meaning to intrude but never able to look away. As the sun went down those picturesque glass portals would light up, one by one, revealing a man washing dishes or a woman opening a bottle of wine. Simple, mundane things that looked just like art to me, like an Edward Hopper. Sometimes, string lights would flicker on across the garden plots and French doors would be flung open as guests floated in and out of them. I would watch a beautiful woman in a summer dress light candles on a long wooden table and bring out platters of food. I wanted to know her. I wanted to be her. I would watch as people sat down and passed the wine and could only imagine what worldly things these sophisticated New Yorkers must have been discussing. It could have, of course, been nothing. But to me it was invariably everything. I could hear their laughter as it danced out into the night. I would periodically look out of my window as the hours grew late to find them still just sitting there, talking with each other over the last ruby drops of their wine. And while it all looked so much like Brooklyn to me, more than anything it just looked like life. Real, breathing life happening all around me.

When I remember that trip, it’s the visions of those simple, intimate moments that I love more than anything. Yes, the MoMA is brilliant and Manhattan is marvelous and Central Park is a fairy tale, but there’s real life happening amidst all of these things. That’s what interested me. That’s what I photographed and wrote about and and felt inspired by.

So I suppose that this is about paying attention. It’s about the love that a singular place can awaken within you, and how you can take that love out into the rest of the world and use it to enhance your perception of life. That’s what I’m trying to do on most days anyway.

FURTHER READING & A BOOK RECOMMENDATION

For other love letters to NY and its art: click here to read More Than the MoMA or here to read about Edward Hopper and Being Human.

This is also a great book about nyc that changed how I see the world.

JOIN THE FUN

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