I have several memories of New York.

It hasn’t been long since I was in New York, New York with my friend Nick, but it feels like another lifetime, almost. I’m sure almost everyone has that at some point, where some memory seems fragile with age despite its relative youth, but it’s still strange. Or maybe they’re not fragile with age, but rather separating into bits and pieces that surface at odd times and in odd places. I don’t really know; describing something that goes on in my head is complicated enough that I can’t really approach it without a metaphor of some kind.

I remember being in the Museum of Natural History, awed at the sheer size of the blue whale hanging in the marine biology room. Even when Nick left to go back to our hostel, I wandered around that room for hours, taking it in. Nothing I’ve seen since has managed to monopolize my attention like that sea of information. But what really surprised me was the fragility of the environments housing all these alien creatures, as if the ocean is made of tissue paper, as we’re tearing it apart casually, without really understanding what we’re doing.

Sometimes I imagine ships approaching the New World, their hulls almost impeded with the mass of fish roiling in the water. The ocean must seem so empty now, in comparison.

I remember walking the edge of Central Park, almost afraid of going in. The border between the park and the city seemed like a place where a curtain had been drawn open on another world. Like a giant surgeon had removed this rectangle of city and replaced it with this sea of green. All around the edges, the buskers and traders set up their wares; the homeless sat at the intersection of wall and sidewalk. But inside the park itself an air of reverence had laid itself down, only to be broken by a barking dog, a laughing kid, an iPod playing louder than iPods should be allowed.

Can’t say I’d ever want to go in there after dark, but during the day I could pass the veil and imagine I was walking into Narnia. There’s nothing like it here in Mississauga. Nothing even similar.

I remember walking into Penn Station with Nick and seeing armed guards posted at every entrance: the mental scars of 9/11 still hadn’t healed. Everyone was on high alert. Later, viewing the site of the attacks, I imagined the buildings crumbling, imagined the plume of dust and debris spreading through the city. I couldn’t take it all in, that something so tall, so massive, could be reduced to fragments in mere hours, mere minutes.

Thankfully, I’ve never been witness to such events. Hopefully I never will. Sometimes I can picture the panic of that day, and of the aftermath, but I have no desire to be a party to them. I want to go back to New York someday, maybe even live there. The subway, the Starbucks, the hostel, the cigars on the roof, Times Square: it was a wonderful time.