22 was an age I could not wait to turn.

I had a premonition of it.

It was an age I didn’t know yet, but couldn’t wait to. One I couldn’t have loved yet, but rather knew that I was going to.

So far, it has looked something like this.

TWENTY-TWO

Sitting in the candlelight of a speakeasy in Brooklyn, feeling my entire world spin. I never knew what I know now.

Walking through idyllic avenues of Brownstones on a late, summer night as hot rain falls from the sky.

Eating street dinners under string lights as people ride by on bicycles and cars honk in perfect unison. It’s live art. Everyone is a stroke a paint.

Watching summer lightning shoot through the sky from a window in the middle of the night.

Sipping wine on a rooftop overlooking the city I spent my whole life dreaming of.

Walking around the industrial streets in the hazy, golden hour, feeling entirely present while somehow suspended within another dimension.

Taking the wrong train home. Being so dumb and dazed and suspended from reality by collisions entirely unexpected that you get on the wrong train and neither one of you knows it until 8 stops later.

Waking up to early sunlight and walking right through it in baggy jeans and a t-shirt to get coffee.

Strolling summer block parties and packed parks in the late-evening hours where copper light clings to the air like nothing I have ever seen.

Getting dizzy from laughing on street corners in that light as Brooklyn lives and breathes around us. Life feels like a dance.

Riding the train and smiling, smiling like everyone knows you are not supposed to do on the train, but not being able to help it. I cannot help it.

Being in an old-timey, Italian restaurant eating spicy eggplant and tasting each other’s wine as the space around us turns to a blur. Writers take in their surroundings. We drink in the world like water and try to spit it back out in another state. I am used to memorizing walls, spaces, things I heard being said or small moments I intruded upon, and saving them for later. I am used to being in the past, present, and future all at once. But being there in that restaurant, I was simply in one place. I was simply noticing just one thing. The rest did not interest me.

Standing on street corners in Manhattan as the lights change and the city turns itself over to night. I want to linger in it’s frame. I would crawl into the moon and drink it’s light just to illuminate that scene for one moment longer.

Sitting on a park bench under warm, iron lanterns and a full moon, feeling intricately intertwined and in touch with the rhythm of the world. This world. A rat crawls into a paper bag and we laugh because we must love New York a stupid amount.

Standing on street corners at 12am as a cool, summer, metallic breeze blows through my hair and the streets turn to a dizzying array of neon lights and taxi cabs. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Alice fell down the rabbit hole and the world was never twice the same.

I have fallen into New York and nothing will ever be the same.

Click here to support a small artist with big dreams (me)