Dear New York,
I left you today. I know you didn’t even pause long enough to notice; you’ve never had much use for the past tense, New York, or for those who use it. You’ve always been a forward-looker, a destroyer and reassembler, the Great What’s Next. That’s why I shouldn’t have been surprised when I cast a last backward glance at you from the doors of Grand Central on the way to catch my train, and you returned it with the F-sharp blat of a taxi’s horn, and you kept moving. And I knew again it was time to go.
Two years ago this week, another taxicab picked me up at La Guardia Airport and dropped me in the West Village to begin my life as one of yours: a New Yorker. It was 1:30 in the morning. West 11th Street was empty, the asphalt glazed with rain, the scene as still as a movie set. I groped my way up the dark stairway to my two-week sublet where a low bed sat beside a window grilled with bars that looked out on still more barred windows. The night was muggy, and I lay on the bed in my underwear with the window open and listened to the sounds of my new city — first the hydraulic wheeze and grumble of the 3 o’clock garbage trucks, then at dawn the unlikely wop! of tennis volleys from some millionaire’s rooftop court.
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♥ LITTLE CROWN
