Summer in the city

For the first time in my life there were no mountains in my view, and I admit, at times, I missed the still air and the Meyer lemon tree in my front yard back home. But I was anonymous in a city full of strangers, in a city that I was told never slept. It never slept. Light lit up the night like an artificial haze that begged for neon and sleaze and I had to explain on the phone, "Yes mom, people are really still walking on the streets at 3 in the morning. No, they aren't all drunk. I'd say some are ambitious tourists…gotta go."

In parks and semi-forgotten side streets of New York City, fireflies flicked fluorescent lime green glints in a way that immediately held my fascination and relinquished my west coast origin. I was under a spell. I had never seen them before, fireflies. They were like reachable stars, bursting through the suffocating heat of summer nights. I was a wanderer being tugged along a path so serendipitous that the destination did not matter. If it existed at all.

I was anonymous.

In a city full of blinking lights, I felt no panic, only a placid stillness. Some wonder returned to me in that moment, the first time I saw fireflies like the first 4th of July I can remember as a child. It was my own intimate Independence Day, cracks and pops of micro green yellow fireworks that confirmed and celebrated my existence as a young adult on my own for the first time in my life.

The Chrysler Building guided me home like the North Star on those nights -- stars, in the natural sense, did not exist, do not exist, in New York City. Instead, I had broadway marquees, buildings, lights left on in the office buildings of the 3 A.M.er’s, the workaholics, the frat stars turned financial suits, fireflies. Stars that never turned off.

The city never slept that summer. Most nights, I did.