Slow Dance

From afar it looks like a fairytale.

They paint the scenes in movies, in magazines and war stories, they make it out to be a place for the wildly succesful, the impossibly beautiful. They make it the unrechable dream, and they put it in your head that perhaps you only imagined there was a place for you in it, and that you would fall off the edge if you stepped onto its land.

I walked up the avenues last night, the 9-5 crowds making waves around me and the afternoon still sweltering. Stepped quietly into the Park and climbed up onto those cliffs, the same as last time and the same as the time before that. Seven years I've been coming to this spot and it wrings my heart every time, I wanted to tell the people around me, as they Instagrammed their iced teas. The sun began to set over the West Side, little beams streaking through the buildings and all the skyscrapers had that certain, incandescent hum about them.

When the evening grew dark, but still with that Mediterranean humid heat and little beads of sweat made their way down my back in sheer surprise, I walked down Sixth avenue in a daze. Every street corner, every twist and turn into the West Village nook that is mine, was a familiar scene, was an unconscious move because I have done it a hundred times before. And yet every time I looked up, did I not lose my breath just a little, did my eyes not twinkle a little more than before?

They make you think this place is not for you, that there's no bother in coming. But they do not know how New York concrete under your steps make you a little more steady on your feet, how the scent of warm cigarette smoke and restaurant exhaust perfume in your lungs make your back a little straighter. They do not know how yellow cabs in the corner of your eyes and cop sirens in your window as you fall asleep make you a little calmer, a little safer in this life.

New York,
You may be a fairytale,
in their eyes.

But to me,
you will always be
just home.