If I Could Be There

We spend our days in art, in the impossible gifts the city gives you when you dare to ask for them, we navigate a thousand conversations along the Manhattan grid and stop only for snacks or introspection. We are never sated. Love is a friendship that still grows, still builds, even decades after the novelty has worn off and maybe here is its purest form. When all the rest has burned to the ground, when the lovers have packed up and left, when the art evades is and our children never were, will we not still be here with our fits of laughter and unwavering support in the mire?

One day, I stood in the window of an old electrical substation and looked at my city. The art behind me was overwhelming in its story, present, a reminder of all that New York is and was and how when we have art in our veins we must, we must, we must let it out. But I stood staring at the city instead, at the low, painted rooftops of the east village, at the bits and baubles of neighborhoods cobbled together, at a glittering skyline in the distance I could recite in my sleep, it sits like Braille at my fingertips. It falls and it burns and it closes shop, but though it sloughs off the old like a detached machine, the city is still recognizable in each new version, is still inherently familiar. No matter the window from which I watch it unfold, from which I watch it wink at me, it is always my city, it is always my home.
And when all the rest has burned to the ground, my every breath will whisper its outline into the night, how it will remind me
what
love
is.