to jacob : a postcard

Astoria – Ditmars Boulevard, July 2015

Dear J,

Zadie Smith once wrote about New York that "You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.”

She's right in a way. The city is like a version of the American dream on high, individualism becoming a religion and dreams becoming currency. Yet, it's this very feature that makes this city of sociopathic dreamers the magic place it is, truly unlike any city in the world. It has an energy about it, powered by the low hungry rumble of millions of hearts that dare. They ("we" now, I guess) "dare to disturb the universe" in a way that T.S. Eliot's Prufrock never did and here we are for all to see, piled on top of each other in high rises and rushing past one another in great rivers, yet never quite seeing the beautiful, terrible, wonderful humanity of it all.

It's gritty, raw, glittering, and so unapologetically real in a way I've never known another city to be.

That's the beauty of New York, my dear. In a way, it's the home that's never really been home and I love it more than I have ever loved home.

Yours, V