March 29, 2021 - The first time I took a breath of air on the island of Manhattan /

The first time I took a breath of air on the island of Manhattan as someone old enough to remember his experiences must have been before 2007, when I visited New York a month and a half after my twenty-first birthday ––– but I can’t remember when. I know I visited the city as a child, decamping from the middle of Ohio with my parents and siblings in a Chevy Suburban and heading east. We made these trips at least once or twice a year for a while, but those memories aren’t clear for me. I remember being outside of the giant apartment complex in the Bronx where my godmother lives and hearing and watching subway trains in the distance. The convergence of buildings and roads and sidewalks and above-ground subway trains felt other-worldly. Although I was only seven or eight years old; I must have known back then that the feeling of being driven around and guided through the great metropolis would be an emotional landscape that I’d want to revisit ––– again and again, as I grew older. Though back then, in the nineties, my earliest trips to New York were less about a blossoming love affair with the city, and more about noticing the world, as well as my ideas about it, expand whenever we’d arrive in Manhattan. We never stayed for very long, three or four days at the most.