I lived in New York City, Manhattan–so I’d get those spiffy envelopes that said it: New York New York, for five years right after college. I moved to Philly more than a decade ago, but when it came time for my 30th birthday, I had my party in New York City. This was an act of nostalgia for my twenties and an act of love towards the city. I’m facing the next turning of the decade, and I’m headed back to New York. I don’t know what that means. Maybe it means I’m salmon swimming upstream to the watering places that shaped a younger me. I’m going to spend a celebratory weekend, and will make a symbolic stop at my once glamorous watering holes, The Algonquin and the Royalton for one cocktail each. I was so excited to walk in Dorothy Parker’s steps when I was young.
New York still feels incredibly familiar but strange. Manhattan doesn’t need me, it has its own thing going and I haven’t been written into that story. I no longer belong to the New York City timeline. I get occasional glimpses of the city’s evolution. My weekend jaunts are little postcards from the future to my current self which holds the old Manhattan in its mind. In the early 90s, Manhattan still had a kind of wild rugged energy in places, and now the whole of it feels like a polished grand dame to me. Maybe it’s because I’m older and I gravitate to quieter scenes.
Anyway, salmon, swimming upstream, not to spawn but to witness, maybe catch a glimpse of myself rounding the corner. Who’s doing the gazing and who’s being beheld is the mystery.