"… quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grate on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later– because I did not belong there, did not come from there– but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month."

—

Joan Didion, “Farewell to All That” (via drinkyourjuice)

I used to feel this way about NYC, though I was born and raised here. You feel as if you’re closer to whatever that superior force is that makes things happen when you’re in New York. Something extraordinary, good or bad, is always around the corner. It’s like that feeling you get when you have a word on the tip of your tongue, but can’t seem to blurt it out.

The intensity of that desire, for something extraordinary, for something else, reminds me of the Icarus myth. It feels as if you’re flying too close to the sun. Ultimately, I moved away, because intense, palpable feeling of POSSIBILITY was too much to bear. Eventually you’ve got to get your shit together and make some choices, pursue goals, and I just couldn’t drown out the city siren call long enough to think things through.

I still love New York, foul-mouthed, exuberant, volatile New York. I think that I’d love to move back some day, when I’m older. But living in New York as a true blue adult is like watching children play in a jungle gym. You feel younger by proximity, I guess, and you’re hoping for a taste of that wild youth, that bloodlust that is the undercurrent of New York. The city is a different thing to you now, though, because you’re just a spectator, going to expensive restaurants, oblivious when you want to be to the kids who are selling their souls for fleeting glory. Like shooting stars.