I was only going to the grocery store.

That’s what happens here.

You set on a mundane endeavor only to have the most intoxicating rendezvous with humanity.

SPOTTING LOVE AROUND BROOKLYN

There is absolutely nothing sweeter than walking around Brooklyn on the fourteenth of February, seeing how many guys you can spot carrying two coffees and a bouquet of flowers. I could not stop smiling. Everywhere I looked, there was love. Or at least, the suggestion of it.

I sat on the L train next to someone carrying an array of pink heart balloons and wondered why any one who is single could be sad on Valentine’s Day. On the day where you get to see love, to know that it is real and all around you, everywhere you go. It’s in the extra moment he took to pick this bouquet over that one at the flower stand. It’s in the blushing smile of the young girl stepping onto the train with two baby pink rose in her hand. It’s in the laugh of the woman when boyfriend couldn’t stop kissing her in front of the kale and green beans.

It’s all right there, showing you what love is what love is not. They might just be surface level representations of affection that are perhaps only suggestive of love, but each year I adore them all the same.

BEING NEW

On the note of adoration.

Being new to New York is a lot of having no idea what you are doing and wondering is everyone knows it. New Yorkers stand out in that they are absolutely stone cold in sync with the energy of the place. They know trains and cross streets like the back of their hand. Tourists, on the other hand, perpetually look as if they are about to lose their minds. With their phones reading them directions out loud and their heads swiveling around for signs, they look at me with pleading eyes of desperation, tragically mistaking me for someone who has any more of an idea of where to go than they do.

I’m definitely just pretending. It’s fun when I actually can help them though. A woman stopped me the other day in a total panic, looking for the G train like it was a lost child. Luckily, there was a giant green G sign right over her head. I pointed and she took off running.

Usually, I am swimming somewhere lost between the two. Somewhere within a liminal space of learning. I know I am young but I have learned to not rush experience. I am in no hurry to be an expert of New York. I have grieved the sweetness of innocence far too much to wish it away when it comes.

SOON ENOUGH

I know that soon enough I too will become fluent in the language of the trains and cross streets and neighborhoods. These things will become a part of me. But there is something special about being so brand new to it, about knowing that I will never again not know these things. You only get that just the once. And then it becomes a story. It becomes, When I first moved here, I hopped on a train to Coney Island, thinking I would step out into Manhattan at any minute. It took me forty-five minutes and a dying phone battery to realize it and get myself turned around.

But you do. You figure it out. One learns to get oneself turned around and headed the right way, Bill Hayes writes about these trains. It’s exhausting and when it’s a hundred degrees out you think you might really die down in those tunnels, but you’re doing something most people are afraid to, he explains. You’re willingly subjecting yourself to the horrors of being new at something, getting lost, and having to figure it all out on your own.

I have learned to savor that process. For once it is gone, you can’t ever get it back. You shed a skin, leaving it on that train to Coney Island while you take the right one to Manhattan. Two selves dividing and one is only ever running away from the other. That person becomes a distant memory, a ghost, swirling around the present existence of you.

A POLLOCK PAINTING

I felt this process beginning the other day.

I passed by the MetroCard station I stood utterly confused at my first time here, before I had learned that New York had long since done away with tangible train passes since I had last been. I saw the shadow of who I was, standing right there, trying to figure it out, and realized that’s the first one. My first ghost of New York City.

California holds twenty-one years of my life. There are twenty-one years worth of movie scenes that play themselves out for me around ever corner of where I grew up, apparitions of every age, experiencing the events of my entire life. There is comfort in that, but also a nagging ache. A feeling of not being able to fully breathe.

I left them in California. I remember feeling, as soon as the plane left the ground, the inexplicable relief of that. I could breathe. I was a protein denatured, an egg hitting a hot frying pan, knowing it is irreversibly changing into another form of itself. One thing, turning right into another.

You step out into a brand new city and everything is unmarked. You did not learn how to roller skate in that park and he didn’t kiss you on that corner. That isn’t the highway that leads to your high school and your first apartment isn’t just up ahead. It’s all a blank canvas, waiting for the chaos of you to make a Jackson Pollock out of the whole thing.

Standing there, seeing the ghost of me from years ago, trying to figure out the train station, was like watching that first streak of paint fly across the canvas.

The very first stain.

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