I live on a tiny island in a vast river in a modest city. The view is different every day, but the walls of my home stay the same as I work remotely, write in the evenings, and have necessities delivered. Getting away can be a matter of sanity, and so I’ve learned to travel.
Travel has profoundly enhanced my writing. I don’t go often, but Painting Celia has been in the works for quite a while, and travel usually comes with luxurious stretches of time to just write! I take advantage when I can.
With a June trip on the horizon, I’m thinking aloud about one of my favorite places.
Ode to New York City
I dearly love NYC and would move there if I had an ounce more hustle left in me. It’s León’s hometown and I first went to get a feel for the place he grew up; the grit, the yearning, the struggle, the art. My first visit gave me a taste, and I go back every chance I get.
I savor the smells of street food (or litter) and the lively skitter of crowded pavement (or rats in the litter). I’ll never forget the sight of a rat so big that the locals jumped and pointed! That’s part and parcel of a big city, and I enjoy the memory as much as any other.
At home the world is smaller and quieter so I feel bigger and louder. Not so in New York City, that paved tarantella of ambition and traffic. Personalities are writ large in every nook. Somehow, every mundane thing you see is new! The millions of tree-well gardens and corner shops are carbon copies, but distinctly unique. It’s a flip-book come to life.
The relative hush of stepping into Central Park underscores the cacophony my brain is trying to tune out. Is it escape to a smaller nature, with space to breathe? No. The alien skyscrapers at the park’s bounds, fine-boned and impossibly tall, remind me that NYC’s scale will not be ignored. Like living inside a pointillist canvas, every colorful dot is a universe, and though the painting is too big to comprehend, it exists whether I bear witness or not.
In the heart of Midtown, my oasis is the Drama Bookshop, as cozy as ye olde European cafes but also a venerated theater mecca. The smell of ink greets me. Sitting with a cup of tea and an open laptop, I can breathe in the books. Each page is a slice of moments, paper-thin wooden cross-sections that echo but never repeat. They are an archaeological record of human feeling, there to be felt anew if I just open the book. Put them together and they make one solid tree, one flip-book, one pointilist painting.
My book is small, one comma in an infinite encyclopedia. It retreads an honored traditional arc, a love story told around the first campfire. New York City reminds me that every story is the same, but only the way every bodega and taxi and rat are the same. Every voice is mute within the hum of gathered humanity, but only in the way every thought swims in a sea of literature.
I love when New York City reminds me I am the ordinary and the extraordinary, the individual and the collective. I’m ready to write again in the bookshop, not diminished by immensity but feeling the river hold space for my tiny island.
