New York

Writing Challenge: April 14, 2017

Prompt: Write about a vacation you took

I had never been to New York before. I always wanted to see the bustling city in person that seemed so full of life on TV. I never wanted to live there; the fantasy would be gone; I just wanted to visit once or twice and then forever content with the screen-magic. When I visited the Big Apple for the first time in March it was exactly what I had expected it to be; no more and no less. The buildings were a jigsaw full of different sized pieces. People walked briskly through crowded sidewalks, weaving between each other but never touching. Cars piled up in the streets, egging forward for a few extra feet of ground. Even the most chaotic sights and sounds seemed perfectly at normal to the blasé New Yokers, while tourists wandered through the sidewalks either lost and unsure, or excitedly pointing at everything: in both cases they viewed the city through the phone cameras. I didn’t feel like a tourist, nor like a local. I was simply content being where I was in the moment. I didn’t feel the need to take pictures of everything I saw. I had no real desire to go out of my way to see the “tourist attractions”.  I was there and that’s what mattered.