New York has changed for me as a friend changes with distance. Though we have remained in touch, trysted in the scraper’s arms, laid dumb in the city, one of us has changed and something is lost. I have moved house (Harlem was traded for the Upper West Side) and changed vocation (Columbia traded for the United Nation) and while I don’t feel much different, that is perhaps it. After all, change wreaks a tectonic shift on occasion—maybe the plates are misaligned, the strata contorted, the parallels bent. So it goes.
It is true that the similarities between last week’s lifestyle and this week’s are few. In the last I rose mid-morning and fell at midnight. Now my hours are more diurnal and because of my proximity to the early morning I meet an entirely different breed of people. As I student I mostly met other students, or still others who shared our atypical lifestyle: homeless, jobless, aimless, misanthropes, transients, travellers. Now I’m one suit amongst many. So many. Pinstriped maggots on a concrete cadaver, the subways heave. Thousands of us, replete with badges and wallets and umbrellas, perform the elaborate ritual every morn and eve—the dash to the train, the sidestep, the door-hold, the tacit acknowledgement of another familiar with the ritual, the less tacit disdain of those who are not.
There is much more to say but in the face of nine-hour days there is little stamina left to say it. Thus, I retreat for now. More transmissions will follow. If not for your sake for mine. So it goes.
