Landing

July 21, 2010

Day one. Landing in New York didn't seem quite so strange today. Whenever I actually think about how it is that I'm really coming to live here, it doesn't seem real, but when I realize that I will not be only visiting, I'm overwhelmed with a kind of vertigo. Walking to the AirTrian platform I could have burst in to tears but only for a moment. I wonder what I have done at times, knowing so little of what to expect. The city feel quite normal to me. Strange for a place I have only been to twice.

I realized today that the New York subway smells a certain way. I can't quite place it. A little old, a little dirty, something of plastic and stale air and warm bodies moving though it very fast. But for some reason this also always makes me feel a little lost. On a train leaving the city it seemed very odd. I can't quite place what it is. Perhaps it is the difference in architecture? Perhaps it is the different slant of the sun? Perhaps it is the briskness of the people? But there is something that hangs in the air for me like the melancholy like the sunlight in an Edward Hopper painting, warming and yet containing a certain distance.