New York is a central whirlpool, the kind of place that feeds and consumes all that come near it. It also begins to feel insufferably small the longer you live here. The storefronts on 14th street begin to feel like the pedestrian Midwestern malls I grew up with. It’s remarkable only in how quickly it becomes your only reference point. The small towns of the South, Midwest, and country become quaintly small. You feel only the massiveness of buildings. Buildings, fashion, smells, subways.

This is altogether the same romance that artists crave from New York. To claim it as their own. To be a New Yorker, although the common verbiage or what I heard early on was that five years means you live in New York and ten means you are a New Yorker.

The Upper East Side becomes the part of town you never go to- the Lower East Side the land of the club kids and college kids. The neighborhoods of Brooklyn become the places everyone moved after graduation. Bushwick is hot this season, we say. Crown Heights. New York is a story of gentrification, money, history.