Friday night. I take the subway for the first time in months. It’s been raining and inside the air cooled car peoples’ umbrellas rest in pools of gritty rain at their feet. I’m not quick enough to a seat and stand instead over a rowdy group of girls, headed for the movies.

Let’s see the scary one, they say and begin to squabble over how to get in, none of them being over seventeen. I am facing the window and watch in its reflection the movements of these teenage girls. How they can laugh so loud, jostle for attention and still give away, with the subtlest of movements, some hint of their adolescence. Their collective self consciousness.

I wonder if they recognize this about themselves. And then, if they recognize it about me.

I ride the two past Times Square, to fourteenth where I get off and walk the remaining avenues over to Union Square, just to avoid the L. I do this not because the L train never comes, although it never does, but because I fear its passengers. All going somewhere, all important. All New York.

I am ashamed that I no longer am. Ashamed and relieved and I exit the train halfway between nostalgic tears and angry sobs of overwhelm. I used to strut. Used to glower. Used to do these things, in part, as a self protective necessity. But now that I no longer do, that stormy glamour has been replaced with a confidence that doesn’t translate in the city. Only makes me feel so small when I smile, when I try to forget, as I used to years before, that it’s my nature to do so.

So much as been discovered and I am left wondering if I should bemoan or celebrate my separateness. Because I worked so hard to make New York a part of me, and went with out the rest to do so. Starved myself of some essential piece of who I am to mirror a city that will never love me back.

And so I feel lonely where once I felt invincible. Maybe that’s just the down side to moving on. To the bravery it takes to look across the subway car, at ones own reflection, and see past the perfectly painted layers. These two hundred dollar ksubi jeans. This expensive gold watch. This handbag. These accessories picked carefully to define a girl I’ve never been. To fit me into a place where these items might matter.

….

I once thought New York was the city where everyone fits. Now I am not so sure. Because so much of that armored shell is gone now, exposing a tender underbelly I worked long years to prove I didn’t have. But with its absence. With the removal of that push to feel like I fit, comes the energy always freed when a fight comes to a close. The energy to hoist oneself up off the floor. To exit the ring.