My Own New York Postcard

Image "Untitled" by Arvindgrover courtesy of Creative Commons

New York is my second home--full of cynicism, constant noise, a darkness that is never dark and something to do at all hours of the day. I experience the city every day. I walk down the same streets. I go to the same coffee shop. I take the same train lines. I pass the same street vendors. I see the same people begging for money. I see the same view from my kitchen window.

My idea of the city never seems to stray very far, I experience New York City in the way that my routine has allowed me to experience it. I notice when there is a change to a building along my typical path. I don't like it when a new person makes my bagel in the morning because they don't know how much tofu cream-cheese I like. I really don't like it when I am forced to take a bus as opposed to the subway. I have my very own New York and I never wanted to experience it any other way.

I see the planes pass over head from my window; flying low over industrial Brooklyn. I was on one of those planes two days ago and for the first time the New York that I have grown to know was gone, replaced by the city of lights seen on postcards sent around the globe.

I don't fly often, this was the first time in four years. The most fascinating part of the plane ride is always those five minutes before landing, when you can see until your vision causes the land to become so blurry it blends into the sky. The part of the flight where building look like they were made for a town a child has created. I saw a number of cities from the air during my travels this past week, and I had seen New York from this view before, but when I was descending onto the city I now call home, I saw a different scene.

Crossing over the bay that separates Staten Island from Brooklyn, my friend and I figured out where we were. I saw New Jersey, I could recognize it just as well as I do when looking out from the Chelsea piers, but it was no longer in front of me. I could see the shapes of the waterways carving their way through the land. There was the Hudson and the East river, Manhattan laying in the middle. The lights are brilliant from such a height, nothing like the views one gets from the rooftops of buildings in the outer boroughs.

Manhattan looked like it does in all of the postcard pictures but my mind knew the city in a different way. This experience was even more intense while looking down over Brooklyn as we flew across. We passed the clock tower at Atlantic Ave, a few blocks from where I work. Then the Willamsburg Bridge. The landscape changed as we entered Queens. I was seeing the entirety of the city in a matter of minutes.

New York City is one of the largest in the world, but from the height of a plane it doesn't seem so massive. The buildings no longer tower above me. They look like toys, something I can pick up and move around. The people don't exist from a plane. The streets pass by in seconds and I don't need to worry about which way the walk sign will let me go.

The city becomes a play land, but it also becomes something magnificent. I know, when looking down upon all the lights and the cars, that there are people all around. I know that my apartment was below about thirty seconds back. I know the streets I frequent are still there. I know the view will not change from my kitchen window. I know that I will enter my New York once I pass through the doors of the airport--I will feel the polluted air, hear the noise and interact with the people. But for those few moments, I saw New York not as my city, but in its entirety..