Hello world.

I am in love with photographing this city.

With graffitied trash trucks and flickering neon bar signs and salads that have been scattered across sidewalks.

If you do it right, living here becomes a kind of dynamic art itself. Messy, chaotic, stained, addicting. My parents have been visiting all week and it only took one glance at their horrified faces on a packed train car at rush hour or one note of my mother’s shriek as she nearly stepped on a dead rat to realize that there very well might be something morbidly strange about my love for this place. My mother snaps photos of rose bushes while I am focusing my lens on a garbage truck with graffitied bubble lettering.

Aesthetic differences aside, I have been running them all over NYC all week, laughing because I’m no longer the only staring wide-eyed at the massive trees and historical charm. My own residency within the place is still shocking to all of us. Having them here has reminded me of the times we would visit years and years ago, back before I knew that this world was my fate.

WHEN I MET NEW YORK

When I was a kid, I had an aunt and uncle in the city.

When we would visit, I remember thinking they were wizards for how quickly they ran around the place, hopping on and off trains, crossing streets at their will, climbing endless stairs all day. It was like nothing I had ever seen. They lived in a tiny apartment up five flights of stairs that always had the windows open because the heat would get trapped that high up. I have fuzzy memories of sitting in their living room and looking out of the window at neon lights and wet streets, hearing sirens and voices and god knows what, and falling just a little bit in love. I don’t know why. There was just something about having a little apartment in that rat-run world, a cozy space to come home to after a long day in the world, that made me feel something even then. Even at nine years old, long before it ever occurred to me that that feeling might mean something.

Being here with my parents again has reminded me of that kid. I am startled by the distance that spans the space between here and there, still just always trying to fathom how one thing leads to another. How I was a dream struck nine year old wondering if the train would kill me each time it launched down the tracks one moment, and an adult living here the next. How I was standing on the sidewalk one November as a child, speechless at the endless rows of Brownstones and fall leaves one minute, and living in one of them the next. Patti Smith asks in Year of the Monkey if we dream our dreams or are dreamt by them.

I still don’t know.

Speaking of gorgeous literature, I recently picked up Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles at an old bookshop in Brooklyn and have been falling into each page ever since. I’m a sucker for poetic prose, for the the kinds of sentences that defy grammar, running right into each other or stopping short. The kind of writing that English teachers will tell you is too “wordy” in a futile attempt to consolidate your rambling mind. The kind that practical people hate because there’s no straight and narrow storyline to hook themselves onto. Poetic prose is a free fall. You reach out and grab at the air, pulling pieces of someone else’s world right into your own.

THE SOUND OF A MEMORY

As I am writing this, a tablet keeps dinging a sound I could never forget.

I am at a local coffee shop and dinging is letting the baristas know that another DoorDash order has been placed. I know because it was the soundtrack that haunted me when I worked at a restaurant back in San Diego. It would be totally slammed. I would be standing there with a highchair hooked under one arm and the tablet under the other, an impatient guest standing cross-armed waiting on a table while the toddlers at that table dunked their broken crayons into their milk, the milk that would undoubtedly spill in three, two, dingding—the tablet would sound. The milk would spill. The people waiting for a table would start to death glare me. All while I would have one minute to check and confirm the aforementioned order, an affair you quickly learn is not to be taken lightly if you don’t want an angry customer calling you an hour later that her extra dressing was never put in the bag and that she wants to speak to the manager and that she we don’t possibly expect her to pay for such a catastrophic disaster do we? Do we??

I really did love that job though. I hated it, but I loved it too. It was my first real job and so it was afforded the kind of forgiveness that all firsts get. You loved it even when you hated it and you always will because it was you first and it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if you were slipping on the greasy kitchen floor or sneaking cashews under the hostess stand because it was too busy for a break, it just didn’t because it was your first and that granted it, and always will, an unreplicable kind of love.

I am sitting here now, hearing that same sound, but I am not in the same place. I am not the same person. I am not standing on the corner of Kettner, brainstorming ideas for upcoming papers while fending off hungry crowds and that is both tragic and miraculous. To no longer be nineteen, to no longer be in college, to no longer be in California, this all might as well be news to me. When? How?

The older you get, the more you understand that there is an inverse relationship between your desire for time to pass and the rate at which is actually does. The former decreases as the latter increases. You find yourself grasping at minutes, gripping your hands hard against another year falling away, so sure that if you hold on tight enough, your palms will hold something more tangible than memories when you open them. But they never do, and they never will.

That’s the beauty of it.

In other news, it’s Sunday and that means flea markets and chocolate croissants. Iced coffee and Nina Simone. My mother telling my dad that, yes, she can totally fit a vintage silver candlestick in her already overstuffed suitcase and that yes, it is most definitely a necessary purchase. I agree.

I hope you enjoy yours. xo

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