Hey you,

Have I told you how much I love you lately? Because I think you deserve to know.

I believe that everyone who has come before me, will come after me, and who are living through this time currently with me, all have fallen in love with you in their own very unique and serendipitous ways.

Personally I fell in love with you at the impressionable age of eight. Every time we would drive into the city I would stare out the car window, training my eyes to catch the blue line marking your presence and the space between New Jersey and New York in the Lincoln Tunnel. Like a cannon shot out of the dark we would emerge from the tunnel, and I’d marvel at the blue skies and become entranced by the towering, shiny buildings.

You’ve always made me feel at home.

From the moment I walk up the stairs at Penn Station and hear the sounds of frustrated taxi cab drivers beeping their horns at careless pedestrians…

To the love songs filling the air by a random man playing Frank Sinatra on his saxophone at 14th street station.

Over the probable hundreds of times we’ve crossed paths, you’ve always meant something different to me. As a young girl, you were a nurturer. A place defined by hospital rooms, chemotherapy, and surgeries. A place where I would peer out of floor length windows of a waiting room in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital, and would wonder what the man in the office building across from me was looking at on his computer. Yet, through all of these darker circumstances I still found myself consistently growing curious by the trees lining Bryant Park and the confident women strutting in their trench coats and pumps down Fifth Avenue.

By the time I was a teenager you were still a place of urgency due to my mother’s health. But the experiences had evolved. We began trying new restaurants on the Upper East Side and I would venture out on the streets during her appointments. I’d take the shuttle from Sloan to make payments for my mother and peer out the bus windows at children playing basketball on sunny days. We’d stay in the Hilton next door to the hospital and order fancy Thai food. We’d laugh at the name of the drug store “Duane Reade” and how I pronounced it funny. You, New York, were exhausting and yet you were also continuously bright.

You protected me. Kept me away from a hospital room in Brooklyn where my mother would take her last breathe and instead gave me a day with her in Manhattan where we’d lie together in a hospital bed eating pizza. The time after she passed, we grew apart. There was no longer a hospital for me to visit, or a reason. It felt as the ties had been cut.

But you reeled me back in as the chapter of college began to unfold.

I’m now a short forty minute train ride from you. A weekly ritual where I come see you in quaint little coffee shops, illustrious book stores, open subway seats, and dusty record stores. You have given me a new meaning to how I think of you. I see you through a light of independence and as a new meaning of opportunity. I’ll never forget what you meant to me before. But you are different now. I’m writing my own story and seeking my own love affair through you.

You free me, make me feel like a new person. Until I can say I’ve covered every inch of you, I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied. You are always changing. The restaurants, the poetry readings, the activism, the demeanor of the people. You’re stone cold beauty. You’re struggle and uprise. You’re dirt and pearls. And I’ll always love you for it.

Thank you for making me feel like I’m alive.

Sincerely,

Your not so secret admirer.