New York

Riding the D train back from Brooklyn to Manhattan at night, rushing over the East River as the Manhattan skyline looms closer and closer… a feeling of duality. I’m still in New York City, but I’m seeing the Manhattan skyline.

On Saturday afternoon I was at a friend’s apartment in an area of Brooklyn called Midwood. From the World Trade Center I took the N train five stops and the D train twelve more stops. Further and further into Brooklyn, farther and farther away from Manhattan. When I got off the train I turned off a shopping street and saw… houses. Houses in Brooklyn. Houses in New York City. I keep forgetting how vast this city is.

I was at the apartment of a friend from my old college a cappella group. He and his girlfriend made chili, and a bunch of us New York-area alumni from the group got together, maybe 10 of us. We had a great time. We did some vocal jamming, tried to sing one of our old songs, ate chili in this worn apartment on the third floor of a ratty old house… I felt like I was back in college.

The singing group is less than 10 years old, so we alums are all in our 20’s. I’m astonished at the talent some of these guys in the New York area have. Several are working in the music industry now, performing and managing and so forth. A couple of them do improv and comedy skits together, and they’re also working on a screenplay. I feel so small next to them, so boring; their work lives and their social lives seem so much more interesting than mine. Their lives seem simultaneously more focused and more carefree.

Three of us rode the D train back to Manhattan — the screenplay-writing improv duo and myself. We’ve known each other forever. We were all going different places, and they were discussing the quickest way to get to Midtown. “See, if I take the blah train to blah blah blah, and switch at blah, I’ll get there faster, because I’ll be at 42nd and 8th, while if I got off at blah blah blah…” They both live in Manhattan, and they were rattling off the station names without looking at a map, and I felt so out of it.

I don’t absorb the details of the outer world as easily as some other people do. I work in broader strokes, absorbing the gestalt of my surroundings. Or I observe, Zen-like, the shape of a building. Or I imagine what it feels like to be the person sitting across from me, imagining what she’s done that day. Or I try to figure out how to put a particular experience into words.

I get lost in my own inner world. People think I’m just spacing out. But I’m not. They think I’m oblivious to the details. But I’m not.

Like them, I’m trying to master my surroundings.

I’m just doing it differently.