You grow up with it, always in your mind, occupying a special place. Even if you aren’t fully aware at the time.

When you’re born, it isn’t mentioned. It’s not you, and as everyone knows, you are the star of your own birth. Therefore it does not show up. But at the time you don’t care. Soon enough, when you’re a kid, you’re aware of it. You know it’s there. “There,” however, seems to escape you. But you know it’s “there.” You watch movies and television shows and everyone talks about it. That’s where all “those people” are: those talented, deserving creative types. Those geniuses. Those artists.

Even if you don’t find yourself thinking much about it, you are never quite unaware of its existence. You live literally all the way across the country, and yet, it still shows up from time to time, in stories, ideas, song lyrics. Like it should. It becomes a character in the story, not just the location. In fact, it begins to transcend mere “location.” It stars in a movie. It is the focus of song after song. But you still don’t bother to lift your head up to see the details, to notice the art of that place. You’re too deeply entrenched in snowballs and comebacks. You’re too busy living the life of a child. Just like the adults you meet on your way to your own adulthood, you don’t have time to ponder the surroundings in a place that doesn’t physically surround you, not when you have your own locations, your own characters, your own plots to worry about. You’re too busy, at ages six and seven, writing the first few chapters of your autobiography to concern yourself over the merits of some place that, for all practical intents, need only remain a distant, fading ghost.

You know it, though; you’re very familiar with it as an idea, at least. It’s big, expansive, full of people, hustle, bustle, anger, crime, heat, cold, passion, purpose. In short, it’s life. It’s everything you’ve ever wanted to experience, good or bad, even when it’s hundreds of miles away. It’s sex, drugs, rock and roll, literature, pain, poetry, and prose. It stares at you through the culture you’re raised in, even after the specter of its existence haunts your parents who claim they’re moving you away from such horrible influence, because you just never know what will happen to you, and, after all, you know, it’s safer in the country. Which, as it turns out, it isn’t.

You sit in your country residence, pining away with your dreams, and there it is again: sitting there, as much a destination of your life as it is a destination of geography. It’s where you actually think you need to go to do the things you think you want to do. It becomes a sort of myth of a myth: always two steps out of reach, so much so that you begin to not reach as hard. You decide it’s a “one day” sort of thing; maybe, when you’re older, possibly, who knows, perhaps, we’ll see, if you’re good.

You pretend you’re there. Your friend pretends he is where he wants to go, and you realize that you certainly don’t want to go to That Place. You want to go where you’ve always wanted to go, a place you’ve actually been twice. You’ve given it cursory little glancing blows, popping in as a mere tourist, seeing only a couple of things you were specifically shuttled to and from as a fifth-grader. Oh look, golly gosh, holy smokes, what’s that, can we, should we, we’re going to, oh boy! And eighteen months later, when your uncle offers to take you and your cousins to see it, you act like a little professional know-it-all, directing a thirty-year-old man and his nephews around this place you barely know and have no real right to direct anyone around. But you do it anyway, because, for a few brief minutes, you got to walk on her streets, smell her smells, and see what she had to offer. Before they scooted you back on the bus.

And then, once more, you were separated. And it hurt. And you weren’t really sure why it hurt.

So you return to that world where you have little more than your dreams, and you got distracted. You forgot that there was this place, these people, this culture you had to go be apart of. You were too busy chasing after people who wanted almost nothing to do with you and had even less to offer you. Instead of making plans to accomplish something, you were wrapped up in comic book dreams, imaginary radio empires, and a fictional world surrounded by nonfiction. You had deliberately stuck yourself in the middle of nothing. But, the whole time, she was waiting. Staring down at you like the sun: always there, warming you, always affecting what you do, but you don’t have to be fully conscious of its presence for it to affect you.

Until that one day, when a few words drift across your ears. The words are an invitation. You can go. You can be there. You can see it all over again. And so you begin to plot, plan, scheme, dream. And you can taste it, it’s so real. Before long, you’re on your way, riding far above it all in an airplane. Your companions are too tired to stay awake, but you’re wired on that fact, that you’re almost there. You’re almost back there. The anticipation keeps you awake, even if the caffeine cannot.

And then you land. And then you’re there. You are in the thick of the legend, breathing the air, basking in its glow. And you begin to realize, after making your way to the center of it all. You belong. You belong to those skyscrapers. You belong to those streets, those restaurants, those voices, that world. You feel a sense of balance you’ve rarely felt, a sense of connection to something that dared greet your ancestors for centuries. Something that gave you a sense of possibility, of success, of fulfillment of dreams. You finally get it. The connection is real, because you feel like you’ve finally found a place you can comfortably call home. And it’s real, no longer that ghost. Your home is New York.

And then all is right with the world.