The Starry Dynamo of Night

When I was a child, I believed that the stars were actually angels, and that if I looked up to the midnight blue of night, directly at the glittering seraphim, and prayed long and hard enough, my biggest, most unlikely dream would one day come true. After family dinners in the breezy summers of Wisconsin, I would sneak outside in the twilight of evening, as the stars began to emerge, and I would sit on a swing in my backyard, looking and unknowingly feeling like a Steinbeck character, in the country, a misfit with a mist of dew rising around me, creating an uncomfortable wetness that weighed down a young girl's prayers. With the sounds of cows and the smell of grass around me, I yearned for a dirty, harsh, shiny place where truth was not masked in forced smiles and casseroles.

Those same stars found me ten years ago, when I found the clearest representation of my dream. I viewed those stars in between the glossy sheen of skyscrapers in the city I lusted for in many a slumber. I first stepped out of my cab in New York City, Wisconsin family in tow, at 19 years old, and, for the first time in my life, everything seemed to make sense. In the most chaotic, loud, dirty, and uncompromising city in the world, I found peace. I did not want to go to Times Square. I knew instinctively that this was not what New Yorkers did. I wanted to sit somewhere, anywhere, in the city, and observe my soulmates, all 6 million of them. I met my friend, braver than I, who was teaching at a school in the Bronx but living on the Upper West Side for the summer, and we sat on a bench on Amsterdam while smoking cigarettes and watched people pass, people lucky enough to live in this magical place, people taking for granted the sparkling angels of night hidden by the sheen of silvery skyscrapers in the city of people awake more hours of star-gazing than anywhere. I wanted the disillusionment. I wanted the chaos. I wanted noise. I wanted it all.

Ten years is a long time...

A decade can represent a lifetime of love, heartbreak, knowledge, death, transformation. All of it, yet none of it, matters. The angels listened. Finally, twenty years after my first wish and ten years after coming close to touching its reality, my dream has come true. I am a resident of New York City.

This blog, a mix of truth and fiction, is a love story.