The Faces of New York

Flashes of police lights and sounds of sirens. Retrievers with families and bulldogs with hipsters. Green trees and squirrels the size of housecats.

New York- an exercise in contrast. A symphony of disjointed notes and dazzling harmony. A neighborhood of the friendly where you are constantly surrounded by strangers. A place that is home to everyone and nobody at the same time.

I have mixed feelings about it. It’s phenomenal, of course, and simultaneously discouraging. I seem “New York” when I leave and so “West Coast” when I stay. I fit and I don’t.

In the West Village, the haven of gay culture and young people, the only violence I ever hear about is against gay men, and when I hear of it, it is usually recent, deadly and totally inconspicuous.

I’ve become both more tolerant and less so. Drag queens make sense to me, and I don’t blink at the homeless man on the subway starting his monologue. Diversity is the norm. Celebrity is irrelevant.

I scoff heartily at “cash only.” When my friends visit without any heels, I get annoyed. I judge people who don’t drink alcohol as boring, and I find it weird when I can’t get takeout at two in the morning. I tolerate the homeless man on the subway but know how to avoid him confronting me.

I see love all the time. I see it in the couple on the pier reading in the sun, the surprising number of water bowls put out for dogs around the city, in the young man freaking out as he yells at another that he broke his heart. I see it every time a woman with a cane walks onto the subway and someone gives their seat away, and every time I show up at my busy bagel shop and the man behind the counter offers me a nod and expedites my order.

New York is a weird place- the best and the worst all wrapped together in a vertical package that juts into the sky without restraint, reaching for heaven and falling short. Every time I come to a conclusion about its worth, about its character, about its suitability it changes, it tricks me, it fools me into finding its beauty, its scars, its head on a platter begging, eat me up. Eat me up because soon, I’ll have a new face.

Soak up my ever-oscillating faces and sink into messy, beautiful opportunity, and you might just find something that makes it all worth it.