Tales of This Town: A Love Letter to New York City

New York is a contradiction. It is loud and quiet, old and new, welcoming and foreboding, intimate and strange. It is both the ultimate truth and the grandest of lies. It is all these things and so much more. And it is the place I call home, the place I was born. It coarses through my veins and surrounds me like an aura. Sometimes, I do not know where it begins and I end. Put simply, New York defies expanation and definition. It simply exists as an almost living, breathing entity - a complicated, complex being that does not know its own power or strength, but knows it can make all things possible.

The imagined becomes the real on its dark city streets. It exists in beauty and horror and at the absolute center of it all. This is my New York - the stuff of brilliant dreams and horrible nightmares. A delicate dance between the extraordinary and the truly mundane. New York is my home, my sanctury and the center of my imaginings.

New York has an intimidating exterior, a jaded, cynical air that comes from years of hard-nosed experience, yet New York has a quiet soul. The soul of a poet - a creative, inventive type that does not see the world as it is but sees the worlds as it could be, absorbing the life experience of its inhabitants, changing its very nature in the process.

If anyone claims they can tell you exactly what New York is, they are lying. New York is never one thing - it is a variety of experiences and contradictory emotion. It is the upper-crust billionaire; it is the hard-working blue collar laborer; it is the illegal immigrant working for less than half of the minimum wage. It is all these things at once, existing in the same time and space, yet separated by every other dimension.

New York has a soul. It has a personality, living and breathing in distinct neighborhoods where the only thing everyone has in common (other than living in there) is being absolutely different. Yet, New York does not implode or explode because of the difference. It embraces them. It lets these differences thrive. The grand social experiment that is New York has survived almost three hundred years. And it will continue on long after I am gone, evolving into something all together different and something even beyond my imagining.

New York is completely beyond my realm of understanding and that is why I love it so. It challenges me and makes me question all that I may possibly be. It pushes and prodes me to become something all together different.

This is New York. My New York.