NY, NY

Places are funny things. The very word conjures up something concrete, stable, like it's the bedrock of all the nouns. Persons and Things can move, change, die, and be forgotten, but places are places. They always have been and always will be. And perhaps they don't change. Perhaps there is something platonically absolute about places and it's the people within them who change, which reflects on their perceptions of a place. I'm not qualified to tell you, I just got a 4 on my AP Psychology test the end of junior year.
But what is it about a place that gives it its very placeness?
Take New York City for example. I went there with my high school choir for five days in March of 2010. I had never been there before, and had no idea what to expect. I mean, I knew the names of the buildings and the major streets and how there are supposedly taxis everywhere. I knew the people would be mean, the subways dirty, and Times Square unimaginably bright. But how could I reconcile the many hundreds of portrayals of New York City I'd imbued over the years? Was I to experience the autumn, modern-but-classic You've Got Mail New York? The snowy timelessness of a Sinatra song? The gritty (and beautiful) realism of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn? WAS EVERYONE GOING TO BE SINGING ANNIE, NEWSIES, OR WEST SIDE STORY ALL THE TIME?!?!?
As you can probably guess, it was none of those things. And all of those things. Spending just five days in a place with so much placeness as New York City is clearly not enough to experience any more than just a leaf of the tree, but I created my own New York City for myself. It became for me a place of friends, a metallic chilliness, exploration, elevator rides, grey coats, subway slime, pigeons, museums, a thousand and one smells, and the strange austerity of all those lit buildings at night. Most of all, it was our hotel that had green and gold carpet that I'm sure felt no different from carpet anywhere else in America, and a tiny grocery store slash cafe a block or two from it where we bought breakfast every morning. Orange or grapefruit juice, a bagel, and a Special K strawberries and cream protein meal bar.
I went hiking in Zion National Park last weekend, and when we got out of the river to eat a snack, legs un-numbing uncomfortably, I unwrapped a Special K strawberries and cream protein meal bar that I had snagged at a gas station on the way. I stood at the edge of the whispering water and looked at the sun sliding over the flame-orange walls of the canyon, two thousand feet up, red, dry, and untouched, and I was back in New York City. I wondered how I could possibly be two places at once as I chewed that protein bar, craning my neck up to the towering sandstone cliffs and also, somehow, at the towering buildings that lined 5th Ave. I could feel the goosebumps on my legs from our trek through the frigid water and my aching feet, and the goosebumps on my legs from the late-winter winds that whipped down the streets like breath through a flute and my feet aching from getting lost for an hour and ending up near the Rockefeller Center.
Sometimes I like to go back to a New York I never experienced and put on Norah Jones, or You've Got Mail, or turn to Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. And it's like, with mine thrown in, they're all four completely different places.
And so I think that with places and people and things, there are as many places in the world as there are people.
No more, and no less.

Boyfriend -- Best Coast