Status Updates From Goodbye To All That

I was in love with New
York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.

“I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.”

“…and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later.”

“…how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots.”

“…but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.“

-one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

holy fuck this is amazing.

Didion + fleetwood mac

in retrospect, perhaps reading this essay on the same day i watched logan alone (and then sobbed about it in the cab on the way home) was not one of my more sensible life choices....

"...All I could do during those three days was talk long-distance to the boy that I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out, the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years." (too real w the truth, joan! so real!)

"... and although it occurred to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come - was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was." (no one writes being young in a fast new city the way didion writes being young in a new city, frankly)