This Is Not About Me

Once, someone wrote about New York. This did not seem challenging because it was the second city of light, the sister city to the city of brotherly love, the city where push-comes-to-shove in nearly every encounter and the city where most people seemed to be to be someone.

New York had always been a paradox to this writer--it seemed to host an immense pride coupled with a disconcerting unfriendliness in nearly all interpersonal exchanges. She dreamed of a comraderie generating a calmer, happier atmosphere, and though she loved New York this vision always haunted her, like the unknown freckled past of a quiet lover.

Her favorite encounters with New York were aerial. She savored the moments before arrival when she returned from London or Chicago or Ohio, when the city glistened below her and she was able to see Manhattan in its entirety. Glowing with the glaze of red traffic lights and the yellowed lamps of a million homes, her Manhattan from this angle was simultaneously containable and limitless. Almost always in the seat beside her would be a visitor, some wide-eyed dweller of some other incomparable city, amazed at the strength of the glow in every direction. Manhattan, that tiny island in the midst of New York City, would to that visitor be the home of giants, and the boroughs and suburbs that surround it would be the fortress, an army of two-family homes and New Jersey-tagged Volkswagens owned and operated by masses of immigrants...