The Big One

Suddenly I realized that New York was my real life.  I wasn't Joan Didion or Carrie Bradshaw or Holly Golightly but I was Molly Shea Kruser having my second double gin and tonic at a JFK airport bar.  I had a couple friends, half a master's degree, a job, a room with a bed and books and just the right kinds of clothes that a young woman needs to get by in the city.  I was tough and manic.  I was functionally dysfunctional.  I enjoyed Christmas shopping with my boyfriend at Bloomingdale's instead of buying myself dishes or anything else remotely practical.  I thought taxis were sexy.  I preferred eating at a bar to cooking in my kitchen.  I preferred dancing to sleeping.  And I preferred brunch to any other meal.  And while I did not prefer being alone, New York seemed like the kind of place in which I wouldn't really have to be for long.  

And later, after my flight left New York and I arrived in the Midwest and in the presence of the family I hadn't seen in almost a year, I remembered an early September evening spent in Brooklyn.  The air was still warm and the sky was tinged with the golden purple hues of autumn.  It was a third date in what would soon become a relationship.  My date and I sat on a bench in Brooklyn Bridge Park, looking out at the Manhattan skyline.  He had called the city a knockout and I had wished he was referring to me. He told me he couldn't live anywhere other than New York because New York was the center of the world and that's where he needed to be. I had thought I had understood what he meant as I watched his eyes move between the skyline and my face.  He seemed larger than life to me then; strikingly tall, smart, loud, and surprisingly handsome.  The immensity of the hope and determination he had for life seemed too big to be able to exist anywhere other than that sparkling, noisy, expensive, smelly, glamorous city.  But maybe what I was actually seeing wasn't who he was, but who I was already beginning to love.  Or maybe that's how we all look -- all of us who move to New York because we are madly in love with possibilities.  But now, ten months later, I have a better understanding of what he meant then because now I would say the same thing:  I belong in New York because I wouldn't be content to belong anywhere else.