travel diaries - nyc

About a month ago, I was able to go to New York on a choir tour. That was amazing.

I saw three Broadway shows. I visited Ellen's Stardust Diner, the 9/11 memorial, Grand Central Station, and Liberty Island. I did NOT get cheesecake (not because I didn't want to, and not because I'm on some diet or something, I just got sick the night everyone went out for cheesecake).

And given everything I saw or didn't see, I feel like I just barely scratched the surface of what New York is. I don't know if I could live there, but I could definitely visit for awhile longer than I stayed there.

New York is a city filled with people who are lost, finding themselves, found, and everything in between. When people say the city never sleeps, they mean it - late at night in New York City, Times Square is packed, jam-packed, with people for whom dawn is just a concept.

It's a dirty city - around every corner, there's cigarettes hanging out of mouths, food left on the streets for the pigeons to pick at, and the subway tracks shudder in the dim light with rats. Everywhere smells like the residue of something.

And yet, the more you're there, the more you can taste the dreams in the air. That's the thing about it, though; everybody has 'em. They sell floral arrangements out of carts in the markets and that guy you handed a $20 to just wants to make it big. Everyone is moving moving moving, when it seems like where I'm from, my sleepy, charming little Utah town, there is a general trend to want to stay put. In New York there's a restlessness but also a purposefulness.

New York is never sleepy. It's never quiet and it's never still. This being the way of New York, it's hard to listen to what it's trying to say.

But over the clamor of voices calling for your spare change, if you're listening, if you care enough to wonder, you're bound to hear music.

I found that New York means for you to stop for it - it will never stop for you. New York knows. New York is not the pristine white marble of the Capitol City or the looming peace of living underneath this mountain or even the mechanized childhood jubilation of Disneyland. I have experienced each and loved each but I loved New York because of all the places I've ever met, New York was the most human.

New York knows it's not perfect. New York stopped pretending it was perfect long before my flight came in. New York simply says take me or leave me and even though I did decide to leave, if the time comes again I will decide to go back, because New York isn't hiding from anything or anyone.

New York just simply is what it is, and it lives.

Xoxo,
Em

PS happy (national? International?) happiness day!