mirror neurons
Some places feel inexplicably like home, surprisingly and suddenly. When I moved back to New York a couple months ago, my entire being leaned into it, I sighed my silent apologies for staying away for so long. It's hard to say why a place I had only lived for so short a time so long ago (relatively speaking) should feel like the place I belong, especially at a time in my life when I was thinking of it as a solid stopover, a several-year investment to be cashed in and left once I'd gotten what I came for. It's so easy to be alone here, this city full of experts in solitude. Shortly after I arrived, I went to the High Line one heavy Sunday afternoon and walked myself along the length of it and watched the city in synthetic beats. I felt a kind of shuffling stasis, tried to exist inside of what it felt like to be here, to be breathing and alive and invisible.
It's a hard thing to love a place like this. It doesn't love you back, it doesn't make room for you and your overactive empathy mechanism. I joke about this with people, this over-developed empathy reaction. A city like this, so full of electric life, takes your empathy and chews it up, holds your mirror neurons in an endless game of Simon Says. Hello flame, my name is moth.