Memory city

   Yesterday, I returned from a vacation to New York City, the place where I was raised, and where I spent the first 42 years of my life. I say that I was on vacation there, rather than visiting my hometown, because each time I return it feels like more of a vacation. This is partly because the longer I am living in another place, the more that new place feels a little bit more like home, but I think that it is also due to the fact that each time I visit, New York City seems more and more unlike the New York City I knew. Of course, not all of New York City has changed as fast as parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, for example, but those places are the most familiar to me

   I have always thought of myself as a New Yorker, no matter where I've lived, though now it is difficult to think of myself in that way. My idea of New York doesn't seem to exist in reality now, and it's quite strange to feel that the place that I am from still exists, but seemingly in an alternate way, known yet unknown to me. To no longer be able to physically visit what is in my memory is sad to me, but it also feels liberating to know that my ideas about myself can change, like the city where I was raised has.

Detail from a cellar in Soho

In space

   The photograph above is from the astronomy picture of the day, a website presented by NASA that I look at regularly. I know very little about astronomy, but I find the idea of the otherworldly very beautiful, and the photographs often visualize this nicely, though rarely do they ever show people, as this one does. The image is not meaningful to me because it contains a figure, but rather because this being looks so unreal and out of place in it's landscape, ungrounded, as I often feel. The environment appears cold and barren, yet also inviting in the solitude and quiet I imagine there, away from all other things.