Thrillafest

I’ve taken to walking from 51st street, where I work across from Rockefeller Center, down to the 14th L stop after I get out of work between 7 and 8:30. I’m cooped up inside all day, I rarely take a lunch, and I can already feel summer slipping away from me. So once the day is done, I try to reclaim some of it, walking along avenues and streets I rarely visit, spotting buildings I’ve never laid eyes on.

New York feels habitable after the rain. The air is cool and inviting, and people fill the public spaces with life, enjoying the art installations, practicing tai chi, just sitting for a long while and noticing the leftover dew on the Madison Square Park greenery.

People look at me, and I look at them. I stare a little too long at every handsome man I pass, but never long enough for me to be truly brave. When our eyes connect there’s an optimism, a silent hello, a flurry of imagination of our urban future together. These fantasies start and end within milliseconds of stolen glances.

I listen in on conversations that aren’t meant for me to hear, yet they’re practically being whispered into my ear. Sometimes I sing along to a song I’m particularly taken with, which is a habit I tend to find irritating in others I encounter along my commute. But sometimes the nights in New York feel so electric, and I remember that old feeling I had when I first moved here that anything is possible in this city. It still is, but sometimes I forget. And I feel the urge to sing, like I used to in high school when I still followed even the silliest of my aspirations.

In less than a month, I’ll have been a New Yorker for a year and a half. I think this city has always beckoned me to run away with it. Maybe this summer, I will.