Bright Lights

For every additional mile marker counting our steps out of the city, the lush green parkways turned redder. Along the roads, homemade signs announced U-pick-em pumpkin patches. As I stepped out of the car at our beach house in the Hamptons, the chill bit my cheeks and my shoes filled with sand. It was fall. I looked around and felt that something was really different. It took me a while to realize that it was the blackness; I hadn't seen such dark, or the stars, since I got to the City. I walked along the beach, picking shells and photographing blades of grass glistening in the setting sun. Saved stranded jellyfish and fell asleep to the sounds of waves crashing in the bay.

It was a weekend of hob nobbing with the film industry elite. Of networking and exchanging business cards. Of pre-judgement artistic angst and post-premiere glasses of wine, celebrating the seemingly earnest applause, and possibly drowning the insincere flattery that abounds. The feeling that it is all so familiar. As much as I fought to become someone else, to escape the world in which I grew up, this weekend I completely forgot my education and my supposed career path, and I was home.

Convinced, I returned to the City. As dusk turned slow traffic into a sea of glittering rubies, the Manhattan skyline rose up in the pink, cloudless distance. I sat on the R, watching the wonderfully diverse crowds roll by, the dirty subway stops, sweating in my winter coat, and I relaxed.

It is all so Right. I don't quite know how to handle that.