Dear New York,

I am troubled by you today. Can't you cut the humidity when you know I am struggling through a stuffy cold? I feel like I can't breathe your air and your sounds are all so overstimulating. I even went to bed early tonight, with visions of extra sleep and the end of the chest congestion. But instead I am obsessed with plotting and sleep eludes me. I am thinking of what it is to be here, and how I long to beat the system and do it up right. I am not sure exactly what that means, or even whether I am not already doing it. My mind keeps returning to the woman I met in the park this week--she with the In-Her-50's Body that still looked like a Dancer's. Her neck was long like a swan, her smile was perfect and her every move was graceful. And sure enough, she had been a dancer once. She came to NY with stars in her eyes about 30 years ago. But City Life has taken its toll, in more ways than one. She ultimately gave up the dancing and went back to school to be a physical therapist. She got married to someone from another country, had a child, and is now divorced. When she heard where I came from she said "Why on earth have you come? I am trying to get away..." We chatted easily and I enjoyed her company as much as any other person I have met here so far. She told me how her mother died this year and it was an accident and she still can't tell her daughter what happened. Her daughter, age 6, who was playing with my kids in the playground, ran over to retrieve a ball at this point and the conversation took a turn.
I didn't hear about how her mother had died falling into the subway tracks until I spoke later with a mutual friend who filled me in on the rest of the story.
So I realize, New York, that with this many people living so close that there are going to be more accidents, more noise, more garbage all lumped together in a big pile. I know that the windows I can't reach are dirty from exhaust far below, and I understand that my lack of motivation to clean something too old and grungy to ever be truly clean is a personal problem that I need to get over.
But you dangle things in front of me--you dangle a feeling that the sky is the limit, the sense of being the center of something. And now you dangle the possibility of a rent-controlled apartment deep in the Upper West Side. But like good food from long ago that carried with it the lingering flavor of slavery, these apartments, rent-controlled or not, carry with them a hundred years or more of...stories. They include tragedies, yes, and failures and moments of freedom and brilliance and opportunity. I am not, you see, used to living surrounded by such ghosts. They are disarming and seductive and they surprisingly hold power over me in a way that I was never tested in the NW. Is this the reason, My Shining City, that you are referenced everywhere I seem to look these days? Is it simply history? Because of your sheer dimensions you have a lot of stories hidden in the stone, the bricks, the marble. I don't know if I really want to hear all these stories. But then again I have to believe that there is something worth knowing in each and every one.
Time for me to go to bed--encircled by your night sounds and your brightness and your energy. The concept of you has given me more than enough of a distraction to find sleep now.

Yours,
Kristin

PS I blush as I ask, it sounds shockingly final, but is it OK if I call you "My" City now?