I’m running though the neon streets of Chelsea to go to an art opening.

I’m stomping through SoHo, tripping over the architectural sublimity as fashion models pose in the streets.

I’m digging through piles of photo prints at an art flea market in Williamsburg, fending off the competition of hipsters like my life depends on it.

I’m on the L train, studying the cemetery through the windows, thinking about how strange it is to be reminded of death in a moment that I feel most alive. Memento mori. I remember how Patti Smith taught what that meant in M-train as she careened along her own existential train tracks.

I’m on the corner listening to some girls my age talking. So, what do you think of living New York? I think I haven’t been bored in three years.

I’m in the back of a cab driving across the Manhattan Bridge. To the left is the Brooklyn Bridge, to the right, the Williamsburg, and straight ahead is the city, a twinkling galaxy of concrete and glass, stretching it’s way right into infinity from any angle you take. Never gets old, my roommate says. No. No, it never does, her friend replies. I think of Fitzgerald writing, The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.

I’m dancing to some up and coming indie band on the Lower East Side, falling a little in love with the singer as the crowd bonds and sways like one, living, breathing organism. The show ends and the doors open into the regular bar and some guy from the crowd approaches me. Small talk is taken to a whole new level of pain when you have to scream every syllable at the top of you lungs.

The singer is moving through the crowd and we talk for a moment as I think of my friend who told me to go see small bands in New York, that it would be brilliant. That I would meet cool people. I wished she were there to see how right she was.

I am in some bar with my roommate and her friends, dancing to terrible music. We fall into the bathroom, that sacred space of any nightlife venue where random girls become each other’s best friends. There is more love exchanged between girls in bar bathrooms than I have ever seen. Spare ponytails gifted, broken stall doors held, lipstick checked, compliments showered. I snap photos of the drinks in the sink and the love letters of graffiti scrawled all over the walls.

It’s two in the morning and I am freezing on some corner of the Lower East Side, getting entirely lost in the neon world that the city turns into after midnight. Exhausted and delirious, I lean against a building and fall a little in love with the carnival of life dancing around me.

Neon red letters illuminate a pizza place that people cannot huddle into fast enough. An ice cream shop boasts a similar crowd nearby. Friends run around in outrageous, neon fur coats and clacking shoes, turning into blurs of noisy light as they pop in and out of bars and clubs. Drunken guys huddle together, going over their game plan for the night. Cars honk with a new kind of aggression as voices trail, crawling upwards against the buildings and right into the sky.

You can feel it. The pulse. It was symphonic.

I think again of Fitzgerald. Of Gatsby.

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing in their intimate excitement, I wished them well.

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