Tourist

I was in New York City in the recent past. Walking on foot like a dutiful tourist, to places I was told are the heart of the place. I walked around looking not at the sights with which I was already familiar. I walked around looking at the hands and feet and visages inhabiting the place. Walking around in seemingly Brownian motion, each one of those pairs of hands and feet were guided by a pair of eyes to a fixed location. It struck me then that I like cities with histories. Not recent settlements like Seattle, which are a century old, but places where generations have trodden and made the place their own. A city is a new shiny firmament built on ruins. A city is a ruin waiting to give way to a new path. The rubble is lost, but the myths are never buried. They are carried through across generations. The stones and pathways and the buildings each guide its latest inhabitant to live within this newly created environment. Without the knowledge of its denizens, it creeps into their language and lifestyle and accidents and successes and instills a sense of pride as a long lasting scar. I did not see New York City the way the brochures intended me to. I saw it spread thin and luminous and lonely, on those faces, carried by a pair of hands and feet to their destinations.