oh, it's what you did to me

I've smelled the urine of your detractors. I've rumbled through the tunnels beneath you. I have molded the snow in your park and jogged its paths. I've gifted you with my personal economic stimulus package. I've admired your bucolic upstate. I've been disappointed by your produce.

I've dodged the squealing smaller versions of you as they ran past knee and under foot. I've stopped in my tracks at museums and parks where they hover in swarms around confounding adult objects that give them pause from school. I have sat pensive next to your Harlem Meer. There, I ate a bagel with cream cheese and lox.

I have navigated you, finger to my Moleskine with its MTA map, eyes to your signs. I have listened, peered down the stairs and made a run for it. I've backtracked and moved forward. I found shelter under your awnings and your umbrellas.

I've given up the practice of my personal journalism in order to be exhausted by the innumerable, careful steps taken to traverse you. To round your corners and ascend your hills. Some grey, some green. I have bantered with your shopkeepers and your brassy commuters. I've heard slang, swear words and Senegalese.

I've pulled jackets off my sweaty arms as the air changed from the cold outside kind to the stuffy inside kind. I've slapped my hands around the brushed metal poles of your trains and caught the bugs of my fellow citizens. I have sat in the beams of your sunlight and warmed myself like a lizard.

I have photographed your unsuspecting near and far. Tricolore salad and train car. I've grown fat with your offerings and my hourly decisions to accept them. You are quite literally a part of me.

I have admired and mocked your businessmen. I've envied the rings of your fiancées. I've smiled at your stroller-bound babies. I thought ruefully of home while you stood tall and proud around me. I've cursed slow-moving tourists.

I've been tousled and jostled by your finest. I've fallen asleep on your rails. I've turned myself out of revolving doors in the base of office buildings. Out into your brisk pace. My ankles have faltered on your ridges. Here, I have wondered about my weakness. I left you for spells and returned to call you home.

I have stood breathless in Times Square and squinted, awe-struck, at the lights above. I've been swindled by your resourceful homeless. But I've not had any change to spare. Only enough for my own.

I have freed myself of regret. I left myself behind. I have loved you and for a brief and glorious time, I was yours.