First of all, above anything, it is still a city of dreamers.
Many old American towns have relinquished their yearning crowns, that faint spark that promised to preserve, treasure, and cherish the ambitions that burn deep within the inhabitant’s souls. But not New York—from the veins of each of the five boroughs, the spark is still kindling.
New Yorkers get a bad reputation for being sincerely cruel and hasty, but I think that they just know what they want. The snake of a subway, the crowded sidewalks straddled by coffee shops and clouded skyscrapers—the locals have a way of slithering in and out unscathed, and the barrage of tourists that deck the streets simply clog the flow that they are accustomed to.
Upon entering the metropolis, the more distinguishable elements of this world flash, flare, and fly at all senses. Electrifying, but I don’t think there is a word of such fervor to encapsulate the extended multitude of zeal that leaks from the seams and fissures of the city.
Primarily, there is no privacy. On the streets, everyone is getting shoved into everything, bikers scratch against cars, and pedestrians narrowly miss being flattened by the eagerness that exists somewhere in between. It’s a close-knit community without consent because frankly, the upwards of eight million residents of the city will plow right through anyone who dares to take a breath.
From the street view or the raised panorama of the towering apartment buildings and hotels, one person’s routine is another’s fixture of entertainment. One man can be pulling up the sheet in his bed at the end of a day and another can be watching from the 10th floor of his own apartment, separated by a roaring street and the gamut of life below. Nobody needs curtains, really, because no amount of gold, metal, or darkness could prevent the pressure of peering eyes and brazen light from somehow trickling in.
Secondly, life doesn’t stop at the top floor of the tallest skyscraper. Nor does it cease with the throng of vitality at ground level. Standing at the top of the Empire State Building with the night pressing on the eyes, airplanes and helicopters fly by as specks of light in the distance, becoming the only stars in the neon sky. They dip down to landing at one of the airports in Queens, little insects that cause the surface traffic to extend to the air and beyond.
The subway is the mirror rival to sky traffic, causing the deluge of people to broaden and stretch even further. New York is a layered confetti cake—a stratified, dense cavern, intertwined with taxis and buses and roasting chestnuts and hotdogs on street corners. No other city appears to fulfill such a sort of chaos and harmony; the mere quotidian details of life being the main instigator of such an expansive world.
They say that the early bird catches the worm, but in New York, this saying is flawed in a plethora of ways. It was never dubbed the “concrete jungle” for some ambiguous reason; green space is scarce, and with that, there is no dirt for worms to burrow in. On the plus side, there are no worms on the street after heavy rainfall either, but the unpleasant population of invertebrates is instead marked by tenebrous, tainted pools of filthy water, all puddled against street corners. Additionally, even if there was a worm to catch, the metropolis is also dubbed “the city that never sleeps,” making it quite difficult to insert yourself in a pocket of time where stillness dominates the streets.
It simply doesn’t exist.
I don’t think I could ever be a true New Yorker, but a few breaths in the City of Dreams will forever be a flight beyond electrifying.
