The light changes in September. When I get to midtown in the morning, the sun is often so bright to the east that even sunglasses don’t reduce the glare, which dances off the Chrysler Building and reflects back onto the masses headed to work.
The weather has turned - our humid summer has finally faded. A lot of us refer to this weather as “9/11 weather”. It has weight to it. That feeling of hope and possibility that September once brought now brings something else. The little bite of chill in the early morning air brings us back. We cast our eyes up and see that clear, bright September blue. We can argue about the shade - I’d say cobalt, some would say cerulean, some would say aquamarine, some might say manganese - but we all know what blue we mean.1
That blue.
This month marks my 25th anniversary of living in New York. I moved into student housing in 1999, two weeks away from my 18th birthday, less than two blocks from the South Tower of the World Trade Center. I forget all the time that I’m in my 40s, until my body reminds me. It’s been a quarter century, after all.
I loved New York from the second I arrived. I think that my ADHD gave me a strange advantage. What most people find destabilizing about the city - the pace, the randomness, the energy - actually stabilized me. No two days here are the same. Every day there is something new to see. I got my dopamine from the novelty of it all, which was not on the menu in the town I grew up in. Granted, I could have done without a few of the novel events I have experienced here, but mostly, it’s been good to me.
This is not to say that my time in New York has been easy. You can say a lot of things about living here, but “easy” ain’t one of them. It’s loud, it’s expensive, it’s relentless. It’s tried to kill me, more than once. A bad day in New York is the worst kind of bad day.
As much as I love her, she can be a real bitch sometimes. Yes, New York City is definitely a woman. Suzanne Vega wrote a whole song about this.