nic marais

Today’s as significant as they come.

I first visited America ten years ago, and I came to New York City by train. Trains from Philadelphia arrive, as the name suggests, at Penn Station; and Penn Station, I know now, is on West 34th Street. I couldn’t have been more of a tourist: it was my first time in the city, I was carrying everything in an oversized backpack, and all I wanted was to be surrounded by buildings four times taller than anything I’d ever seen. I stumbled out onto 34th Street, just two blocks from the world’s greatest skyscraper, and nearly fell over backwards as I tried to see where it ran out. Views of the Empire State Building are only rivalled by the views from it.

I stayed in New York for just over a week, enough time to realize that it was a place unlike any other, alive and energetic, frenetic and inviting, beautiful, unique, an unparalleled victor of all the benefits of economies of scale: the greatest city in the world. I knew almost instantly that, one day, I’d like to live here; to use the subway without thinking, to know where things are, to have a phone number that began with 212 and a postal address that ended with New York, NY.

And today, ten years later, I packed up some things, navigated FDR Drive and downtown Manhattan in an SUV, and moved into an apartment building just off the legendary (and recently reopened) Washington Square Park. I have a New York City postal address, great friends nearby, and tomorrow morning I’ll take the subway to work. I’m back in New York, exactly as I hoped I might be.

It’s all a little surreal.