For the first time on this trip, I experience an adrenaline rush as I arrive at my destination. The exact cause of it isn’t something I can imminently identify -- it is a mixed bag of panic, and excitement, and fever, but at this point in my life, it is a foreign sensation. Yet, as the train speeds into New York, it is all-consuming, and much of my experience here is similar. For the past few days I have experienced intense insomnia, emotional whiplash, and crippling loneliness, tempered by absolute serenity, joyful laughter, and millions of tiny, precious surprises. New York is built on the diversity and creativity of its inhabitants. The result is a place where every single element of the human experience seems to belong. 

A lot of parts of the city are what you’d expect. Without any particular destination, I join the teeming tourists in Times Square, the wanderers in Central Park, and the hip youth that unapologetically haunt the city. This does not imply that one always walks packed into a crowd. There are many streets that I stroll the emptiness of, each component from the architecture to ground seemingly frozen in time and space. It's almost as if the city, having seen so many comings and goings throughout its existence, has achieved a perfect level of timelessness in the areas that aren't being rushed technologically into the future. In Times Square, an H&M boasts three ginormous screens that keep bikini-clad women selling its image 24/7. If you walk half a mile away in any direction, you will no doubt find yourself on a block mostly alone, surrounded by buildings that display no evolution in the past four decades. It is, indeed, a curious place to be.

I explore as much of Manhattan as possible, when I'm not allowing myself the time and space to rest and appreciate simple acts. On the train from New Orleans, I realized that I was so worried about gleaning as many experiences as possible in my first two stops, my own flow was being thrown out of balance; explaining why I was so eager to get back on the train when my departure was imminent previously, and then would proceed to pass out for hours and arrive to my next destination dazed and half-asleep.

The subway system is more expensive here than in Chicago. Over the next four days, I estimate I spend about $50 filling and re-filling my MetroCard. Manhattan is indeed innately walkable, but it is also enormous, and this point in time, very warm and sweaty. The train, which I take at least six times a day, becomes a perfect haven for all the of things I ultimately love about my experience here: people-watching, liveliness, anonymity, and the sensation of constant movement. 

The night of Independence Day, I cross the river to Brooklyn and walk for hours in a half-hungry, half-fascinated daze. On seemingly every block, folks find a way and place to barbeque and set off fireworks -- on sidewalks, in barely-existent yards, sometimes even in the street. I drink non-alcoholic ginger beer in a bar when I have decided I am officially exhausted and eventually make my way back to Manhattan, pulling in on the subway right at sunset. As I walk back to my hostel along the Hudson River, I hear the crackle of fireworks and stop to take a video for my friends back home.

The next day I begin a three-day stay at an Airbnb rental in Washington Heights. It’s an apartment with yellow walls and cute furniture, rented by classical musicians who are currently traveling. The calmness and privacy of having a space entirely to myself has been missed. I brew coffee and cook things for myself and call my friend Danielle, every day, staying on the phone with her for an hour at a time. 

I spend a lot of time being lost, and mostly in subway stations. In most of these cases, I allow myself surrender and spend 30-minute periods on the benches, listening to music, feeling everything, observing people pass by me in a constant rush while I always stay in one place the longest. Sometimes, I turn off my music and listen to the conversations and lack thereof around me.  A couple of times, I let myself silently cry just because I feel so alive and real. (I don’t know whether to attribute this to my own mentality or to the city itself -- somehow, there is something about this place that is like a warm hug, as if I can be any version of myself and none of it will interfere with the symphonic manner in which it breathes.) Eventually I will decide I want to be back on a train and put effort into reaching a “next stop” of some sort. 

I visit places I’ve read about in books and online, seen in movies. 

Erin McKenna’s NYC Bakery, which gave birth to her book of recipes that became my bible as a vegan teenager, brings me to East Village. The girl at the counter looks bored and unhappy to be there, and eventually I pay five dollars for a frosted cookie sandwich (which ends up being totally worth it on every level.) I wander through Chinatown, the Bowery, and Greenwich Village. 

I go to Williamsburg in Brooklyn for breakfast, and to interlope on the lives of  people in my generation with more money and better clothes, but jobs as hip and insecurities as potent. I eat food that for once isn’t out of some sort of bag, and potatoes that look like they came out of a garden more recently than other potatoes I’ve been eating, at a place called Lodge. Williamsburg is full of small businesses, all relatively new and somewhat alternative, each looking as though they derived from folks with the same creative spark, all tamed in various odd directions. I visit a thrift store staffed by girls with candy-colored hair and choker necklaces, browse through aisles of sequins, lace, pleather, and corsets, as well as accessories and oddities that seem to be on sale only for irony. 

I make my way to the Strand, which boasts 18 miles worth of books for sale. I dissolve into four floors of literature on every topic in the human language for an hour. I find Kris Dinnison’s debut novel, released a day prior, and remember how she talked about it to me nearly two years ago when she first received notice of its acceptance by the publisher. I purchase Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star on a hunch that I will love it and the recommendation of a clerk, who explains at length to me how impressed he was by the writing. (He wasn’t exaggerating. I finished the book on my way to Jacksonville and sat for minutes afterwards in awe.)

The day before I leave, I wake up and decide that I really want to see Ground Zero. 

Walking off the Subway, I first see One World Trade Center, appearing further than it actually is. I still remember 9/11 vividly, despite being in second grade -- my father walked me to the bus stop as he did every morning. An older neighbor kid mentioned to him that “some planes crashed in New York” that morning. My fascination with the event that has developed ever since isn’t something I entirely understand. At points, I wonder if it is a manifestation of my sometimes voyeuristic-feeling curiosity towards death and tragedy. (If you ever experience the same thing, you should read this book.) Or maybe, its status as an event which effectively shifted the tide of the world that I was alive for. My senior year of high school, on the tenth anniversary, my all-time favorite teacher John Hagney dedicated an entire class to watching footage of the crashes and holding a dialogue about its impact on our modern world. But more than looking it from an intellectual angle, it was almost as if we were spending first period with an opportunity to respectfully mourn in a way we hadn’t before.

As I walk through construction to the Memorial, “God” by The Dodos begins to play from my phone, and the closer I get, the more an odd, uncertain stillness takes hold of me. I stand at the edge of one of the pools. I look at the perimeter, and wonder how the towers always seemed so impossibly huge to me. The footprint seems smaller than it should be. I can’t bring myself to read the names engraved in the fountain walls. I spend a long time staring at the water, watching it fall into a bottomless pit, trying to see what I am looking at, not wanting to be distracted even by thinking about what happened here. I go to the other fountain, where the other once stood, and I do this until a feeling of utter unease overtakes me. It is a queasy bleakness that forces my feet to rush past tourists using selfie sticks and keep walking, without an end point in mind, until I hit the New York Stock Exchange. 

That night, my aunt in Florida plants the idea of a rooftop bar in my head, and I realize I want to find one. I go to Bar 13, which some online publication promises is relatively interesting, and pay $9 for a tiny cup of rum and coke, in an empty room. I sit on their rooftop and write postcards to my work, my roommate, two close friends, and one for myself. The next day, I will get on a train bound for Jacksonville, and end my period of isolation while I visit my family for awhile.

I walk back to the subway in a quiet state of studying my surroundings while midnight draws near.  Not once during my time here did the feeling of “belonging” ever leave me, even during the periodic moments when I seemed to leave myself (this happens when you spend so much time on your own.) “Enchanting” doesn’t even begin to describe the experience of feeling alive here -- for me, I was on fire the entire time, in a tidal wave that every other human and thing else was also riding. 

New York recognizes that burning isn’t bad. Burning is passion; passion keeps the city moving; the living organisms here carry a grace with their footsteps that never slows; we are upright reflections of the electricity in its gravity. 

This said, I am ready to sit on a beach and hug someone and swap my boots for flip-flops. So I dance my way down into Penn Station, stand in line for the 97 Silver Star, and disappear again from the care of a locale. It’s an artform, this exchange of love: to dissolve into somewhere, and then dissolve out of it. 

But it’s one I’m getting good at.