Howdy.

By the time that you are reading this, I’ll be on a plane back to California. As sad as it is to leave, I’m excited for the rush that accompanies returning home after a long trip. There’s always a new sense of appreciation for the tiny things of normal life that I look forward to feeling. But for now, here are the last drops of this July rendezvous with New York. It’s been a little dreamy.

THE DRAMATICS OF BOOK BROWSING

I went to the Strand Book Store yesterday, the one that advertises having enough books to stretch on for eighteen miles, and lost all track of time. I first spotted the table with all of my New York loves, Patti Smith, Colson Whitehead, Joan Didion, the covers and titles that I would recognize anywhere like the faces of old friends. I smiled as I flipped though their pages, remembering all of the places that I was when I read their words for the first time. Getting pushed along by the masses of hipsters, waiting to fill their canvas totes, I moved into the tall shelves. I browsed Russian lit, historical fantasy, Irish romance, and a dozen other genres that eccentric description cards led me to.

There’s a serenity in looking at books that isn’t found in any other kind of shopping. You’re not merely consummating a materialistic desire as it often feels like when clothes or shoe shopping, but instead selecting the minds that are going to become an inextricable part of your own. The minds that might just forever change how you see this world. It’s important shit. So I wander, slowly, in a trance. The only thing that snaps me out of it is the self-awareness that washes over me like ice water as I step into the section that always feels like candy to me, self-help. I love those books. Oh my god do I love those books. Don’t we all, secretly? I mean, Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things, that brilliant collection of letters I devoured at sixteen, just got turned into a Hulu series. But wandering into that aisle still makes me laugh because it always feels like a cry for help. Why don’t we call it something else, like self love? That would be just as accurate, but more elevated. I also really wasn’t helping matters when I picked up the brilliant bell hook’s Communion: The Female Search for Love. What a title to be seen pouring over in a crowded book store in Manhattan. You might as well hold up a sign that says female searching for love. But no regrets. Not even when the awkward teenage boy in the geology aisle next door gave me heart eyes. Keep walking.

I walked right into the poetry section, another vulnerable genre to be caught perusing, and read a poem that described humidity as an open mouth. An open mouth. I couldn’t get over how good that was. Now every time I step outside, I feel as if I am standing in the open mouth of New York City, getting breathed on with every breeze. I love when you read something like that and just know that it will never leave you. Like how Insomniac City taught me to see tree branches as mirrors of the human body so that every time I look up, I see my own neurons dancing in the wind.

APATHY IS A STAIN I CAN’T SCRUB OUT OF YOU

I wandered out and sat in a nearby park to city-watch for as long as possible before my body nearly slipped into a heat-induced panic attack and I had to flee the sun. I slipped underground into the subway and joined the crowd of people going home for the day, the crowd that never ceases to amaze me with their indifference to the electric. To the subway cars, performers, and the cacophony of the entire world existing just below the surface of the earth. But that’s the funny thing about traveling. You find yourself in new places, being amazed at what is purely mundane to the millions of people who live there. Like when the G train shoots up from underground and emerges in broad daylight, soaring high above Brooklyn with sweeping views of Manhattan and everyone else is falling asleep. I slyly snap photos. Or like when the subway performers start literally skating the ceilings and doing backflips to 90s hip-hop and no one even looks up from their phones. I’ve lived my whole life in California but the ocean is just as breathtaking each time I stand in front of it, so what gives? Apathy is a stain I wish I could scrub out of the world.

Speaking of phones, I wonder all of the time what would happen to human connection, real, live human connection, if we didn’t have them. It’s such an escape. You don’t have to talk to anyone. People sit right next to each other and say nothing at all. Sometimes I wish that for just one day, I could see what humans might look like without them. Would we talk to each other? Would we feel less alone on public transport?

Anyway. Here are some more fun photos. I call them fun because they are of strange and somewhat mundane things that no one else is stopping to document, meaning they can’t be found by a google search. I take shots of big bridges and famous streets too, the one above of the Manhattan Bridge is one of my favorites that I have ever taken, but they don’t usually turn out as special to me. It’s sort of like taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower in that you don’t really need to. But these, these are the random corners of nyc that I walked through and fell in love with and will never be able to find in exactly the same way ever again. They are my favorite because of that. Ephemerality and whatnot.

I have loved sharing New York and everything that it means to me with you. It’s hotter than hell in July and darker than death in January, and living in general is just more difficult, expensive, and competitive. And if I think too hard about any one of these things, I question why I am so dead set on this city. But then I realize that despite all of these things, and despite the stinging awareness that I have of them at any given moment, there is still, somehow, no other place that I would rather be. There is still love.

AIRPORT ANTICS

Here’s what I’m scrawling in my journal at JKF airport this morning.

6:30 a.m Abraham the Uber driver arrives

• nearly die carrying suitcase down the death-trap stairs and out to the street
• Abraham informs me that he just had hernia surgery and cannot lift my suitcase
• goes on to discuss the difficulties of having hernia surgery

6:45 to JFK

• Abraham misses exit
• I pretend not to notice
• Abraham honks and says that was a close one
• I tell myself this is surely fine
• we miraculously arrive

7:00 TSA comedy of errors

• I make small talk with the guy in front of me
• he’s going home to Seattle, but grew up in Brooklyn
• we discuss the gentrification of said Brooklyn
• the family behind me is accused of kidnapping their thirteen year old: son, do you know who these people are? // JOhnNy! Answer the lady!
• it should be noted that this was funny because the family could not be more identical to each other
• I stand in the security scanner and feel like a secret spy agent
• the rush of being barefoot in the airport

7:30 Coffee

• the best coffee I have ever had at a shitty breakfast cafe in the middle of the airport
• why does fancy coffee from hipster Brooklyn shops taste like tangy fruit juice but airport coffee just tastes like, coffee?

8:00 Waiting at gate

• people watching as per usual
• still not over the coffee
• on the look out for the one person that I will inevitably fall in love with and then never see again
• watching the sun climb
• later New York ❤

Love, m.

JOIN THE FUN

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