TRAVEL DIARIES: NYC

This cannot end well. I thought to myself, staring at the near-vertical stretch of stairs awaiting me and my 30 kilo suitcase. The awfulness of my impending task was such that I could do little but laugh aloud. This was New York, after all, and with the odd maniacal cackle I was simply joining the ranks of the rest of the city's colourful characters. My laughter continued to echo through the SoHo stairwell as I lugged that thing up flight by painful flight; somehow breaking into hysterics seemed to provide ample distraction from my rapidly forming left bicep. With Miley Cyrus' "It's the Climb" resounding faintly in the recesses of my mind, I reached my apartment. It's embarrassing how long it took for my breathing patterns to resume normalcy. NYC - apparently not so big on elevators.

"Everything in this city is hard!" I had whined - saturated and lost - to a friend the day before from under our umbrella as we played hopscotch over puddles in torrential rain. For the record, I had swiftly slapped myself about the face straight after that childish episode, guiltily remembering all of the times I had daydreamed from my desk of trawling just one such Manhattan street for an afternoon. I went to see Newsies on Broadway this week, (EPIC!) and a line from the first scene summed it up for me: "New York life is great; as long as you've got a big door at the end of the day to shut it out." Introverts; unite.

This city is insane. It's dizzying. I absorb more sounds and experiences in a single day here than I would in a week elsewhere. To get from A to B can be a logistical nightmare reminiscent of Catherine Zeta Jones' bodysuit mission in that scene from Entrapment. Just when you think you're a hotshot local who can discern her L train from her F train, "THE F TRAIN IS UNDERGOING CONSTRUCTION ON WEEKENDS", rendering you disorientated all over again and seriously late for brunch. (twitter.com/firstworldpains.) Thus, I blew my whole data cap in my first six days with various attempts at clocking the subway. (See previous parentheses.)

Sadistically, all of this only adds to the fact that NYC is like crack to me. It renders each day comparable to a diluted game of Survivor. (Or The Hunger Games, depending on whether the wait for your table is going to be 60 minutes or 90 today.) The adrenalin from being so overstimulated is addictive. Adding further weight to the crack comparison, on my first week here I averaged four hours' sleep a night and wasn't even tired, so I'm going to assume this simile is valid. Who has time for tired when there are 70 blocks to be trekked, leather skirts for $17 to be purchased, "socially diverse" locals to be encountered and old haunts of 1960s beat poets to, like, totes nonchalantly journal in? 

It's a joke how much I love this town. I'm vacillating over whether to admit that on my first night back here, a brief stroll around the West Village even had had me tearing up a little bit. A smidgen, if you will. Whatever, it was probably just my eyeballs adjusting to the air. Or relief at surviving my stopover in Texas.

I'm off to San Francisco soon, to fulfill my childhood dreams of riding trams around town with the cast of Full House. But I'll probably accidentally leave a piece of myself behind here all over again. Which, I suppose, just creates a great excuse to come back and claim it.