I estimate I went on at least two hundred runs through Central Park while living in Manhattan, the vast majority of them over the last nine months.
Two hundred opportunities to flee the concrete jungle, to feel startlingly alone, to remember what dew looks like on grass, to watch the sun rise or set on water, to observe those lissom, near-invisible transformations of the natural world as it inches between seasons that remind us that “this, too, shall pass.”
Is it mawkish to say that for three years, Central Park made living in Manhattan manageable, and that, for the past year, during the pandemic, it made living in Manhattan possible?
Today, we leave New York, and words fail me. In lieu of unvarnished prose: an unpolished journal of photographs taken while running through her the past many years.
I L N Y.
Post-Scripts: All Things New York City.
+To the boy at the 23rd street stop.
+An apostrophe to the Upper West Side.
+On observing the dawn of spring in Central Park post-pandemic.
+One of my favorite corners of Central Park.
+If you are raising a family in NYC, you need these things.
+My New York apartment judges me.
+And because I need to hear it today: all things must end to begin again.