good city/bad city

There’s a lot of bad things about New York, and after a while like most things in life, all you start to remember, all you start to see, are the pock marks on the landscape of an otherwise wonderful thing.

It’s there every morning outside the door waiting for you, with it’s packed streets and people so close to you on the subway that you can’t remember the last time someone you hardly knew sat beside you (for over twenty blocks) with their arm so intimately touching yours. There are murders and muggings and people without homes, without jobs, without hope in front of you every day (and you pass them and pray that there will never be a day when it will be you). With so many people and opportunities and lost chances at love and happiness and success, at the end of the day it’s hard not to see the bad things about this place.

But then there you are near the end of a long week, (at the end of an even longer day), getting off the local 1 at 14th street and switching to the packed express 2 heading uptown at the last minute (and then find yourself stuck underground wondering why you always get on all the wrong trains at all the wrong times) and you curse New York for never giving you a break.

Finally at 72nd street you get off to switch back to the local in a crowd of people so big you barely make it in before the doors shut. And it’s the hand on your wrist that makes you look up, and you’re ready to say something to someone who is predictably going to bother you with some question about trains or directions on how to get to Times Square.

But then you notice the way you do when you’re really just ready to give up on something, how much just the littlest of things can change the way you feel about something. The face of an old friend you’d hadn’t seen in ages that you’d been meaning to call (but with everything else who can remember?) looking right back at you. Hi.

There’s a lot of bad things about New York, but there’s something to be said about the way it comes through just when you need it. Of all the streets we choose to take every day, of all the trains we happen to be on when we happen to be on them, I like to think that just by being here you’re part of the city’s larger plan (whether you like it or not). And perhaps the only thing we can do (the only thing left to do) is simply stop and accept it for what it really is - always surprising us.

There’s a lot of bad things about New York, but when great, seemingly impossible things happen (odds here are always against you), you remember just how meaningful it really is, and why every day when you get up you continue to make the conscious decision to stay.