What I like about New York is that I can easily disappear in the crowd. I can often be an unknown, for I don’t know many people here. In this state of wandering, I think of my idea of love. I decide, after years of dreaming, that my idea of love is non-existent. That I have fabricated something borrowed from childhood cartoons and fairytales, from films that ended happily ever after, from the love that I didn’t see between my mother and father.
A friend asked, “Well, explain to me, what is this love?”
And I didn’t know the answer. I could only tell him that I am sure it doesn’t exist.
This love of my imagination pains me so much, for I have on a few occasions attempted to open my heart with it. But in the end, the receiver was either oblivious, or simply not the right person. And with this opening of the heart, as I have so much to give, the wound gradually stretches until the heart refuses to close up.
I am now walking around the city with an open heart, an open wound, looking for a love that may possibly be made up from only figments of my imagination. When the Q train heading to Manhattan goes up on the Manhattan Bridge, I look out to the glimmering river, the city shining under the morning sunlight. This fantastic image infuses with my idea of love, and it is in this moment that I want to cry since the pain in my open heart has reached its peak.
These brief moments above the bridge, where no one disrupts the suspension of time, stay with me for most of the day. I am, every now and then, lost in the idea of my love, while people walk around me, sometimes blocking my way. New York becomes bigger as I am lost in this small space of time. Sometimes I feel so small that breathing normally seems not only impossible, but useless.
It is perhaps the nonexistence of this love that frightens me most, the possibility that I will never be able to receive as much as I am willing to give. These are the fears in my mind, and the wounds of my open heart remain unhealed.