Thursday, November 10, 2011

Love Letter

Dear New York,

I like to think of you as having some Grand Design. Yesterday the moon was full and seemed so close to grazing the tops of downtown buildings; I was convinced the universe was made only for me.

I’m sure you get this all the time – in fact, I know it – but just for those days when you feel low and shrunken, when the poor and hungry seem the only constant in the thankless, rushing masses, I hope you understand you’re a loved thing. Symbols are important in a wide world, and people everywhere worship all five extensions of this island. And I’m not referring to your glowering, cryptic churches or the sweeping cemeteries of the outer boroughs. Neither do I sing of the Great White Way, or the myth of the mid-western transplant. Not the immigrant or the Historical Society. (You can see my priorities here.) It’s a je-ne-sais-quoi, to borrow a phrase. The sum of you, I mean, is more exquisite than any of your parts. I think it’s the way your skyline appears across water. Take credit. Thank you for bodegas and subways that stay open all night, thank you for bridges and pizza and beaches, thank you for neon signs and street-side prophets and Friday nights into mornings and so much boiling blood it has to be love.

With that said, I really need your help. True, I’m just one more scrunched commuter in an anonymous 9:00 am sea, I’m just another actress/writer/server/student, I’m a single broad, I’m likely a Brooklyn hipster (ugh, I could be seventy thousand, I am seventy thousand, how cold to confront), but not everyone takes the time to actually sit down and write you a letter, right? I would even shamelessly ritualize, I’d go pay homage on a ferry or the top of the Empire State building, only I’m definitively broke and not-a-friggin-tourist. Because you are pliable like all your flaky constituents, I think you’d appreciate that it’s a fall day and Washington Square Park looks like a movie set (it just might be!) and babies are being pushed around by ethnic nannies and students are furtively smoking and men in sweatshirts and gloves are driving massive trucks inexpertly down side streets and businessmen are frowning at their lunch checks. I am away from all that, in a computer lab. It’s 2011. Hey.

Get-to-the-point-awready-I-ain’t-got-all-freakin-day OKAY, geez, cool your jets. I’m consulting you – the ultimate individual – for advice on how to live my life. I am young and looking for answers, but I’m somehow just old enough for people to have stopped handing down ‘yes’s’ and ‘no’s’; lately it’s all about the shrug-smile or the bracing “Figure it out!” or the misguidedly excited “You’re free! I envy you!” Graduate school applications sent away for have been lost in the mail. Invitations to join groups and form coalitions or continue on current work trajectories resist response. People I want to kiss won’t be leaving for the summer anymore, they’ll stick around, they’ll remind me of things, we’ll all physically age. Money is actually real, not fake. In a symbolic tradition, people are beginning to treat this impending end of my formal education as THE NEXT STEP or THE BEGINNING OF. Simultaneously, adults tut-tut and offer up cautionary tales: you’ll never have it so good. It only gets worse. But I have somehow managed to forget the twenty-one years so far of experience and book-learnin’ that oughta make me at least superficially capable of responding to this brave new world. Instead, I’ve lately been drinking a lot of wine and crying on public transportation and feeling pretty down and out, pretty sad, if you want to know. It has become near impossible to discern a self-worth. I make a lot of lists and go over a lot of recent humiliations to situate myself in time; I cast around for strange friendly eyes or old friends who want to say hello again to make a Me in Many.

But what I do know, what I can remember about the world, is that egomania is never the answer. Moping and self-anesthetizing does no one no good. So, don’t worry, I’m also making art and trying to read newspapers. I go to the movies and I buy lots of books. The circular trouble here is the way I’ve come to comprehend all this input by personalizing it; I make everything about me rather than making me about everything. Do you have any thoughts on that difference? You seem able to give and give and give and also live exotically, live with flair and confidence. I can’t separate impulses to be a fantastic human from being fantastic or being human, so I don’t feel like either ever. Dear New York, you are where lost people go. Dear New York, they say everyone here is a freak. Dear New York, if I can make it here I’ll make it…well, you know.

I wondered, then, if you’d lend me some grace – Statue-of-Liberty style. I wondered if you and your empowered-single-woman-Carrie-Bradshaw trip could pump up my avenue strut and banish some of this weepy lonely girl nonsense, maybe the windows of your Tiffany’s and Cartier’s could remind me that I do adore my reflection in morning light and Christmastime by Radio City means love is possible, always! I’d appreciate any historic gumption you’d point me to, the memories of distant, vague relations swing-dancing in a twenties Harlem of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin. Tell me stories of your wild history, the possibility of change and action in the minute, the month, the passing year. Please let me be reminded of the world outside via the frantic fluttering of newspapers or the sad-eyed beggars at train stations, give me the perspective and love to stop simmering in myself, to care, to drive out, rather. And an encouraging word from the theatres at Times Square, an ecstatic inspiration from the HighLine view, a discount or a loft party from chic Tribeca, brunch in Brooklyn, heroes Joan Didion, Woody Allen, E.B White, the winding Guggenheim stairs, Kandinsky paintings in the MOMA, rock n’ rollers, et.al, the whole shebang. Anything you got. Anything symbol! Send me a sign! I am selfish to ask, I know it, I know it. But doesn’t it take a particularly indulgent, unrealistic soul to live here? To live anywhere?

Dear love of my present life, would you couch me in your clichés? Can I begin to build here, would you hold me, do you think, or should I ease on down to some other urban center? In which case, I’d ask your recommendation unto Chicago. Or Paris. Or Nazareth. Or Atlantis. (Limits are important, they hold the city in.)

Sincerely. Just sincerely.