Write a personal essay in which you describe a place that you consider beautiful.
Section 2.
“Leaving New York ,Never Easy”
New York is the place I want to visit, visit and revisit time and time again. It haunts me like only a woman could. I speak of new York like it’s a woman as no man could encompass so much of what is right and wrong in the world. What is so beautiful and what is so flawed what is artistically pure and politically sour. I’m speaking of new York as a woman who you had and it never worked out, whom you declared to the world( your close friends ) that you loved and you were sure you found the one, you were sure she was your soul mate. So sure, blind completely to any flaws any thing that could hint of anything being wrong. Exactly like a relationship when it ends your haunted, by memories, the good times when you fell onto the bed and what followed, followed for the first time.
I’ll recount two stories inside this as they are tangible.
One will be of when I first met her.
And the other is when I first fell in love.
I was 17 she was count less ages older, her beauty exquisite, her buildings tall which always reminded me of expensive fireplaces not the modern buildings, I mean the old ones there from the dawn of old Amsterdam. The Dakota building in all its glory and heritage named so as of how far cold it was people stated “you may as well be in Dakota”
Housing the philosopher that was john Lennon and the setting of “rosemary’s baby” Polanski’s finest.
The Chelsea hotel was my home for my visit. A building too rich in heritage and history of only American coolness home of Dylan’s birth Sid and Nancy’s demise and a man not unknown to literature famed for his letter writing to women where he declared how much he loved each one, a true playboy of the western world, notice how men can claim to love many women, well new York will always be the mistress. always.
Greenwich village home to the art elite of recent history, Warhol lived and worked, Lennon respectively, Kerouac, Ginsberg and bukowksi all forefather of the “beat movement” and if you move up north on the map a little event happened in Woodstock new York that ruffled a few feathers, I speak entirely of reverence for such a place. But a coin does have two sides. And new York definitely does have two. The insurmountable difference between the rich and poor is so evident. And clear but you have to look to find it. The homeless, the veterans, the immigrants working to keep the veneer of slick and modern. I can speak endlessly of how a breeze in central park is unlike a breeze anywhere else as it resounds the art and creativity of a hundred years of the literary and music and art of the city. But I struggle to find it within myself to speak of the extremes in economics. The poor forced to ride buses to their second jobs to feed there children while the rich queue and wait to get into the hip new club to have their skulls blasted in with inane beats and rotted by over priced placebos known as cocaine and alcohol.
I speak less of the flaws and more of the beauty like one does of a past lover or girlfriend, as that is what new York is. Your first time is always the best you feel young free and resolute. And you learn of the stories and of the history and you tell your friends I.e. the whole world that you love the place, the less enlightened shop and shop buying wholesale Abercrombie and Fitch or Hollister as Americans at least have it right that they aren’t that big a deal. But leaving.
Leaving is the hardest thing one can do. You’ve fallen in love and you must leave for no logical reason, its ending before your eyes and you cannot do anything at all.
Your helpless only to drive slowly( I say slowly as your mind will slow down speed to remember every intricate detail in the horizon) out of this city, mirrored as a relationship forged in steel.
She leaves your head but remains in your heart, as she always will. Her beautiful figure and structure and her stories oh her stories you place them in your heart of hearts as life comes to return to routine. Gone the days of sitting feeding ducks in central park( an event you would never do in Ireland) the breeze resounding still in your breath. The warmth of a new York sun on your face, a distant memory as of a lover passed. You wish and hope for more. The thing is she’s every girl you’ve ever seen in every movie everyone on on late night TV, in her steel and steam, the passion felt is endless,
New York truly is a woman.
And your just another man.
Coming and going in her lifetime, growing expanding, as you retreat from her.
R.E.M said it best with the line “leaving New York never easy”
Never a truer word uttered.
Her landscape spread before you.
You filled with fear and excitement of entering.
Never hoping to leave.
Kraig.
2009.
