59 degrees farenheit, with light rain and thick fog

It's rainy and cold today, an anomaly for August, but much what it was like outside when first I came to this great city. I remember the gaudy "welcome to the big apple" sign at LaGuardia; now I roll my eyes at it, then it actually meant something important to me. The smell outside of baggage claim, the smell of a new city, dark, mysterious, disorienting. I can't smell that anymore. I was 18 at the time, in hot pursuit of an ill-fated romance (I'd call it a trainwreck in retrospect, but at the time, it was a lot of fun, like in the movies). The cab drove with typical bravado through slippery October highways, past the prominent "History channel" billboard, to the Hayden Hall hotel, on 79th and Columbus. The smells of that place linger with me as well--smoky, cheap rooms, with overtones of lavender air freshener. It was a crappy place, as close to the kind of hotel room where detectives on Law and Order find cold bodies as the Upper West Side can manage, but I paid for it myself, and to me it represented my first tentative steps towards independence.

That first night, I met the 1/9 train, saw times square at night for the first time (impressive, not annoying--now I avoid that area like the plague), and then went directly to a coffee shop in greewich village, Esperanto's. You could smoke inside back then. In the ladies room, someone had scrawled "For Ophelia, for we are also what we have lost" on the defunct hand dryer. I had a chai. I'd love to be able to remember what Michael and I talked about that night, but it's a blur.

That was 5 years ago, and in that time, I feel that I've really grown up in the city. It's difficult to recapture the excitement of being on the precipice of a decision that I knew would affect the rest of my life, but sometimes, on days like today, I can walk along 81st street, in front of the planetarium, or though West 4th, where the other important cafe of my past no longer exists, and remember the beauty of being new to New York City.