Our train doors open at Jamaica, and the girl in front of me waves good-bye with one hand while her mother drags her away by the other. My feet lead me to my connecting train, and I settle in, and the world is blacked out as we shoot through the tunnel to emerge in Penn Station, like it’s the most ordinary place in the world for me to be. So I walk, letting these boots propel me into a flow of bodies passing through corridors, up stairs, down streets. I am but a single part of a greater system, people pumping like molecules of blood through arteries and capillaries and one-way streets, the city’s life force keeping tempo with our collective pulse: beats broken by oncoming traffic, a magnificent system radiating health. People at a crosswalk gather around teenage boys doing backflips on the corner as Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” blasts from a boombox. I speed-walk to the beat, bob and weave, choose my route by choosing streets I can cross without having to pause. By the time I reach the High Line, I’ve reclaimed the clip of my former self, a rhythm useless in Sag Harbor but essential here. The city sets our pace, and we abide.

I take the stairs at Thirtieth Street, climbing to the park hovering over Tenth Avenue. It’s grown so much since I left, yet the view remains the same. I’d come down here to sit beside Russian sage, trying to smudge the oppressive stink of home life: coffee and cigarette breath, ammonia-soaked litter, afternoon sex, bacon, peppermint and vetiver oils, that goddamned laundromat downstairs. Exhaust from the washing machines pumped a cloying mix of mildew and chemical perfume into the alley and our window at all hours. Stuart tried cover the smell by burning incense from the head shop down the block, and while it worked at first, my brain eventually merged the olfactory files. To this day, Nag Champa makes me gag.