Dear New York, You Always Have the Words

21 Sep Dear New York, You Always Have the Words

“Do you like it?”

I look up. A woman motioned with her head to my train read, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York.

Two minutes earlier, I feigned a grimace to her when I saw a man lean his sweaty back against the pole she was holding to steady herself. “It’s wet,” she mouthed back.

Now she was speaking out loud about the book I was reading. “It was a charming read,” she said. “I really liked it.”

I do, too.

So many things happen in this city and I wonder if I’m a crazy person for not only noticing them, but loving them—most of the time, anyway.

Never can Say Goodbye (the rebuttal to Goodbye To All That) is full of crazy people like me.

There was Rosanne Cash, who wondered “If I long to travel to time-travel to the New York City of distant past, to the weddings in the blizzard of ’47, to the Bowery billiard saloons and the home of great writers, do recently young New Yorkers dream of my New York?”

Yes. Yes, this one does.

The way Jason Diamond mapped out the city by his favorite restaurants. The way Colin Harrison hoards rare New York City maps. I related to that, just happen to wear my love, wherever I can: around my neck, as a clutch, my nOir ring I can’t seem to find, but mostly, it was the way Adelle Waldman “New York for me is a group of people, who in my early thirties, meant the world to me, a group of not-quite-struggling-but-not-struggling-but-not-arrived writers who supported each other over endless cups of coffee and glasses of wine who listened to one another’s romantic travails and learned about each other’s families and read and believe in one another’s work.”

That, especially this last year, when I didn’t really have much else is my New York. I just want to thank you, New York for providing me with the words, but most importantly, people who will speak them back to me, when I can’t seem to.

You’re the best muse ever—it’s comforting to see I’m not crazy for feeling this way.

Thanks for giving me the words,