Why do the sidewalks sparkle? Is each precariously buried flicker a quietly beating particle of destiny fallen from the cosmos, waiting for us to unearth? In a twist of fate unfurling and long before I set eyes on New York in the first bleak winter of the 21st Century, I knew that my life and the life of the city would be inextricably linked. It was in that dark December, upon seeing the mighty skyline shiver far into the distance, that I was instantly captivated and cast under its enchanting spell. With emphatic whispers New York spoke to me in a way nowhere else would ever do and with an unequivocal belief that, irrespective of time or place, the city and I would grow old together. This experience, which unfolded over four transformative days in 2000, dazzled my imagination and crystallised into my first symbol of New York, opening a door to a new world that has come to shape much of my life thereafter.    

It would take almost another decade, in the Spring of 2009, during a season of new beginnings, before I could call New York home and finally begin to try to comprehend the imprisoned feelings I had harboured deep, for what seemed a lifetime. I had come a long way seeking new frontiers in America, and I was finally out of the wilderness and hurtling towards my glittering mirage. And what will ever be more thrilling to me than the sight of Manhattan? With my restless blood simmering, I sensed the magnetic pull that beckoned the huddled masses at the turn of the 20th Century to abandon their drowsy shores and ride a tempest wave to the city gates, yearning to make their mark on the sands of eternity.

Drawing near, its treasures were unlocked. Beneath the salient bridge spanning the stirring waters, the breathing flow tide of past tribes heaved me towards an island that would soon become my obsession. The street life was raucous, exuding an exhilarating image of human existence. A deafening chorus of strange, incoherent sounds sang the poem of modern life, whilst all around, the blinding lights of destiny sparked an irresistible urge to belong to something as magical and unparalleled.  

Thus began my short but utterly wonderful life in New York.

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Around 4pm, on the pale afternoon of Sunday, March 29th, 2009, I climbed from the Bowery subway and stood in a haze tremored by loneliness, but was face-to-face with what would become the three most impressionable months of my life. Akin to the intrepid migrants a century before, I found myself on the Lower East Side, a diverse enclave that once was the most densely populated place on earth, that still vibrates with the promise of sanctuary and reinvention. From my window at 101 Ludlow Street, I could look down across the urban night at a majestic panorama of unfathomably epic rooftops, strewn with graffiti – splattered proclamations in wild colour. Beyond, the silhouettes of water towers framed the faintly twinkling jewels of the Brooklyn Bridge that appeared to levitate as it leapt across the East River. And to the south, deep within a cluster of iridescent canyons, the monolithic ghosts where the World Trade Center once stood.       

Many evenings during that warm Spring, I would watch the burning machinery of the night suddenly transform Lower Manhattan into a blazing furnace as the windows in the tenements and Financial District sequentially illuminated. In each glowing portal, you could imagine an absorbing microcosm of untold sagas - chapters in heartache and ecstasy unfolding in ceaseless beauty and intimacy. 

It was, on one of these heated and specific nights in late June, when the twilight sky dimmed and was veiled beneath an intense, enigmatic blackness, that I fell into a dizzying dream in which a universe of fantastic lights sprang up. I was standing high upon the shining edifice of the Empire State Building – the flaming crown of the radiant skyline, built from the dwindling embers of Jazz Age folly. Through the years, the ascent to its observation deck had become a tradition of mine, and even now, outgrown by the present huge metropolis, it still stands in splendid isolation, incomparable and proud, like a monumental finger pointing to the moon. 

Tangled within the undulating clouds that silently drifted in from New Jersey, I too drifted into a hushed reverie. As the earth lurched farther from the sun, the spectral skyscrapers, once golden and intimate, started to form foreboding shadows. Looking out in contemplation to the most mysterious reaches of the night, an expanse of electric stars burst their incandescence into the vast obscurity of the country beyond. Their diminishing glow pulsated across the horizon and shimmered with pathos and an acute understanding that, like the nature of the stars, my belonging to the city would be both fleeting and infinite.

Then suddenly and steadily, from the depths of the colossal towers, I heard the auspicious roar of those who arrived in the city as underdogs and grew to become its lifeblood. - poets and warriors Their prodigious incantations hung in the intoxicating mist, breathing the air of euphoria, despair, and freedom. In an episode of slow reawakening, as the dynamo highways of America passed before my eyes and the moonlight swam on the Hudson, embracing the ageing island, it occurred to me that I, too, am an ageing island. Then I woke and understood. Everything was explained. Despite my pursuit of destiny, I would always be caught between two worlds – the wilderness and the wondrous. Yet it is inevitable that the visions of my lost city will endure, and I will continue to return to it to forge new traditions of which I have only dreamt. A time when the sleepy night lifts and the blazing sun squints upon a new New York dawn.