Hyperopia

I think I saw New York for the first time tonight. 70+ degrees in Manhattan today and I didn’t make it outside at all. Living within the confines of a 5 x 10 cube doesn’t really sound like living at all, but we all have to work to live and live to work and it all becomes a hazy mess between Monday’s and Friday’s and the tainted Sundays because of the sinking feeling that work is looming just beyond it.

I walked through Central Park after work where people are walking and running and running pushing strollers with sleeping children and walking holding someone’s hand or the leash of a dog.

The park on Saturdays is full of people who are happy on that one good day of the week where they’re actually living. But at 6:30 on a Thursday night as the afternoon is falling into evening and the sun is slipping behind the Essex Hotel, the park feels different.

You know how it is when you walk and walk and you don’t know where you’re going but you know that walking is the only thing that feels right. Maybe it’s because all day we don’t really feel like we’re walking towards anything. We’re getting up and going to work and going home and it’s all static, it’s all the same. Maybe sometimes we’re being pulled forward when we don’t even realize. Maybe sometimes we’re being pulled towards something when we don’t even know what it is.

In the end, though, we always end up walking home. I’ve decided that my favorite part of the city is 5th Ave along the park because walking down that sidewalk you’re caught in between two worlds, like being in two places at the same time. The fast-paced-passion of the city with its speeding cars and honking horns and gray pavement, and on the other side the calming feeling of nature where you can hear the birds and trees and feel the feeling of grass beneath your feet and you’re being pulled by both but you don’t have to choose.

I may not have seen a lot of the world, a lot of exotic cities or foreign cultures, but I’ve just seen New York for the first time. Maybe sometimes we’re all too concerned with wanting to see what’s just beyond that we fail to see what’s already there, in front of us.