New York City.

One of those feverish, excitable places that feels infinitely vast and yet like it may cave in on you at any given moment.

Serendipity arrives like a mysterious box, one where elation or devastation may await you around any given corner.

Saturday night, walking down University Place with a smile stretched so wide, my very cheeks might have ripped at the seams. Such expression was due to both dancing with nostalgia and the anticipation of seeing a friend whose brilliance is on display just a few paces away.

My nostalgia for New York kicks in when in Lower Manhattan, the area I knew like the veins coiling through the back of my hands. How could I not grin as I found myself walking down the streets that once made me; the microcosms of my undoing.

It recently rained and the stone terrain of Washington Square was anointed, refracting luminous rays from old oil lamps. Such reflection cast an illusion and brought me back to the wide-eyed 18 year old girl who was about to make this jungle her nest.

Up ahead, the imposing building of Bobst Library loomed over me like the tower card.

Walking by brought to mind the many study & writing sessions in a space that made me feel haunted and unsettled. Such dis-ease was by design, as I worked faster when the pressure of discomfort ballooned.

Heartbeat slipping into hands, I walked on.

I saw an old man talk to a ghost from the late 1800s. I watched the bikers, skaters, and peddlers creating social currency and affirming their place in the pack with tricks and tears in their shins. I meandered by performers with a glowing light surrounding their phone as they outpaced the fervor of a Saturday night in winter.

Entering the church, my sweet friend greeted me. I love that girl, her spirit is close to her eyes — if I passed her on the street I think I’d see stars against cerulean skies.

A performance broke out on the floor above, a dancer commenting on the oppression of this system, a countdown in bold Sans (probably Oswald) projected between angels and below the illuminated rose window.

The stained glass was flanked by tapestries on both sides, to the left Biblical saints, to the right: Bell Hooks, Octavia Butler and the likes — saints of our time.

After, I meandered through Greenwich + East Village a bit longer. Tasting how the air currents had shifted, noticing what remained since my departure coming up on two years ago.

One would think that such a city would erase you soon as you left — I was surprised as I ran into familiar faces who greeted me with warm embraces.

Slowly I made it to 14th street, clambered onto the L, switched to the G and emerged in Greenpoint only a few steps away from one of my bestie’s home where I was staying.

Where the time went from there I don’t know.

Regardless, in the coming days, an old friend would take control, the shadow marshal of separation. And by that, I mean the regression + recession into a wisp of self — a robotic stillness that is so direly discomforting you can’t help but check again and again for a pulse.

The dissociative self loved nothing more than to place grey colored glasses on my bridge so as to tint everything with a flavor of apathy. It is a side that I had once ascribed to as some sort of personal failure, but one that I now realize was magnified by a city whose nature oftentimes runs opposite of my own.

True disorientation soon set in, overstimulation infused my blood with such confusion I was beginning to question my cognitive function. For what self-possessed person could make vacant decisions.

The last day I was at the MET to see a curation of godheads from ancient Egypt.

Perhaps it was due to the politics of museums + pillaging of culture underpinning institutions, combined with five planetary retrogressions, that created a creeping sense of dis-ease that soon blanketed my systems.

And by dis-ease I mean I started to recede. More and more, my head became light, stars layered upon my vision, and the urge to get out, away from the gawking crowds, to a semblance of safety, coated me so thoroughly and completely that I raced out of the grand dame of museums like a bat out of hell.

I trudged onto the bus, determined to make one more stop, as the Morgan Library was displaying a curious collection of Medieval Psalms.

Coated with golden leaf, allegoric scenes, moral reminders, and even the office of death — where death, personified, bashed in the head of a pope. That last section made me smirk, for nothing inspires piety like death bashing in your skull.

The exhibit was small and crowded, so I gazed only briefly as I felt the dissociative claustrophobia beginning to press more aggressively against me.

An uber was ordered. As I waited, I wandered into a room full of Renior’s sketches — I enjoyed his work in that monochromatic warm, rosey, ochre color — I didn't enjoy the crowd.

If I had been feeling a bit uncalibrated in days leading up to that point, this was without doubt the crescendo. So I crawled (stepped) into an uber who whisked me through the midtown tunnel back to the spoils of Brooklyn.

I kind of felt like Cinderella when the clock strikes midnight and the illusion disappears in a blink of an eye, though I was not being pursed by a dashing fellow and my glass carriage was really a Tesla.

Nonetheless upon arriving back to Jamie’s home, reality hit me like a mean left-hook. The overwhelm I had been trying to shove down for days with more alcohol than I drink in three months, no longer soothed my frayed nerves.

My friend had asked for a simple something that I hadn’t been able to complete.

It was at that point I had to stop and look at myself in the mirror and ask, what the fuck was going on? How could my cognitive faculties abandon me so readily?

As I peered into the eyes of the girl in the mirror, I saw her soul sinking further and further. Further into the great abyss that absorbs all impact, dulls all blades, and dampens all sensation.

Needless to say, the mammalian part of me, resting in the backseat, was horrified. I had one last evening in the city that never sleeps before packing my bags and flinging them into an uber.

The driver kept engaging me despite my lack of color, finally sharing his Mexican roots and his fascination with indigenous cultures. At the end he said, “life could have sent me anyone, and it sent me you. I will venture to New Mexico.”

A silver lining transposed onto thunder.

Needless to say, the week affirmed + taught me many things. Most strikingly, that I am more sensitive than I would ever like to admit & that the trigger happy mechanism of dissociation was a coping mechanism for a body who could not process or hold such stimulation.

I love New York, I love my girls, I love the strangers, the what-ifs, the synchronicities handed to you on golden platters. It is the place that molded me from the ripeness of adolescence to a version of maiden, a bit more matured.

For that I will always be grateful.

Yet, it is a story whose flame has been blown out. I no longer desire living with a dissociative shadow looming over my shoulder. No longer do I kid myself into thinking that exposure therapy is the remedy to sensitivity.

I am all the more content with a life that may seem smaller on the outside but whose very simpleness is the doorway to presence, mystery and infinity.