Friday's 55 Fiction

Here is the new theme by Anna, on New York. On what New York or the idea (as opposed to the city) of New York means to you. For me, New York is New York; I have distinctive and contradictory memories of it - it represented another place, another idealogy, another me. It remains in my blood in traces, that prick at the oddest times.

New York is much more than a city, and 55 words cannot begin to do it justice; for me, it can be encompassed in two words representing the inherent duality of man's struggle against nature in his quest for civilization since the beginning of time: "everything" and "nothing". There is the irony of feeling incredibly lonely in an apartment high up in an incredibly crowded city, there is the exhilaration of walking purposefully in a crowd of commuters who go to earn money doing something they're not exactly sure of, and relishing that feeling of being an island in a vast archipelago, there is the strolling through the spirited exuberance and superficiality and pretentious naturalness of Soho, the uninhibited glee of finding that cafe selling the perfect felafel, the stiffening fear of getting raped walking down a street at 3am, the ease with which one's body navigates Manhattan once the motor nerves have internalised due north on this gridlocked island, the unseeing denial of the glitter that is times square, the crowded forced intimacy of the Indian restaurants, there is humanity against the technology that threatens to overpower and topple our fragile self esteem.

New York really does represent, for me, the farce that is human civilization, so many different traditions, woven badly into a patchwork quilt, incorporating reams of grey thread - it's sea of stories being polluted by uniformity, conformity, determined egos, it's skyscrapers extending into the ether proclaiming a foolhardy bravado. (I also strongly associate New York with The Fountainhead, as the chloroform that slowly suffocates the idealism that daily enters it, and that gives rise to phantasmagoric dreams. Yeah, that's probably where a lot of my views come from! I'm comfortable in it because I'm familiar with it, but it's not MY ideal city).

Many associate the spirit of New York with jazz. I associate it with the silence in my head willing away the traffic around me.

Here goes my 55 FINALLY:

New York is the final frontier of the unceasing battle between man’s aspirations and his disillusionment.
The ravages of civilization are apparent in the cracks on the walls, the faultlines barely concealed by makeup.
God rolls in his grave, and the stars twinkle in the gravel of the sidewalk, under the opaque manmade night sky.