Love Letter #2

New York,

    I love the friend you have become.  Awkward and sweet in moments that betray your facade of cement.  I love realizing you're late too, all the time.  Seeing through the stability into the many cracks of your humanity.  Yes, I know you have streets lined with false fruit blossoms and big movies and Broadway shows and showy museums.   But you also have that magical garden, New York.  The one on 6th and Clinton with overgrown lily patches and tumbled pebbles hidden in the turtle pond.  You have Hope Deli and the orchid exhibition inside the glass castle.  You have bridges with people laughing and yelling at each other to get out of the way.  The gas station with the man who never sleeps, but always smiles and helps me put oil in my car (even though - of course - I don't need help).

    You have my heart New York.  I came to you because of a fantasy - opportunity, high-rise buildings, big names, epic bridges, opportunity, work, inspiration, sweat, opportunity yes yes yes!  What I fell in love with was your circus, your storytellers, your variety in coconut waters.  The gorgeous Polish neighbor who cooks only Korean food.  The endless stream of parking tickets, forever presenting me with opportunities to forgive us both.  The show-stopping summer rainstorms.  Public lightening!  Pokey umbrellas and wet expensive suits.  Foul subway smells that inspire raucous stories among strangers about giraffe pussy.  It's the poker clubs, clicking with the sound of anxious chips.  The restaurant fuck ups, the amazing coffee, the sometimes amazing sweet potato fries, the shitty coffee.  That pub with all the cowboy boots nailed to the ceiling, Roosevelt island, the tiny beach underneath the Brooklyn bridge at low tide that is happy spawning ground for colorful tampon applicators. Omnipotent pigeon feathers.  The giant slug man waiting next to me for an F train at 3am, trying desperately to connect with someone by grumbling loudly about Bloomberg nazism.  You...you know who you are, human avatar of the city...the unrealized romance I know would be almost as beautiful as this pining.  The self sacrifice, learning to speak up.  The psychedelic spiritual ceremony when someone yelled, "I'll fuck your mother!" and it was so uncomfortable, I forgot about the profound and giggled with the fairy next to me.  The ocean!!!!  Tattoos.  Cheese. 

    Oh I could go on.  But you have a healthy collection of songs and poems written for you.  Who knows, if your head grows too big, you might give birth to another freedom tower (and the chance to make fun of you for that would be as delightful as the bar maid who, after a long, quiet night, watched me suck on the end of a brandied cherry and leaned in to my sweetened mouth, a lock of hair stuck to her lips so that it felt perfectly unperfect and I knew it must be really happening...but did it really happen?)

    Anything is possible here.  My favorite anythings are the unplanned in-betweeners.  The events that become stories because they emerge from such a perceivably rock solid background.  Good job New York.  Way to build a set.  Thank you.  I will come back.  I will make more in the shadow of that egalitarian moon, in the light of your paralyzing sunsets.