Times Squared
A travel diary.
There are moments when we find ourselves questioning the fragility of life, the source of our capacity for kindness, what gives us the strength to be ourselves, all the decisions we’ve ever made. One of those moments broke over me while I was pushing through Times Square on Saturday evening along with, conservatively, half the population of the Eastern Seaboard.
When I was a child, a teenager, Times Square scared me. It was too loud, too much. I was in it pretty often and did my best to push through the jittery, not-quite-there feelings. I wanted to be comfortable there. It felt like a badge of honor, a stamp I should have been able to get on my passport by the time I was eighteen. Switzerland, the Czech Republic, England—45th Street and 7th Avenue. I remember a time before the city turned that stretch of Broadway into pedestrian space. I remember Virgin Records and their bins of $5 DVDs where I found Dracula 2000 and similar cinematic masterpieces. I remember Colony and their racks and racks of Broadway scores.
Times Square was a whirlpool. There was no memory while I was inside it, for holding on to where I was trying to go. Only desperate hope that I would get out somewhere near where I wanted to be, that I’d be myself—still, again—when I did. That was the part of the city I knew best. The part that scared me most.
And then I moved to Manhattan for college. I lived there for ten years, three months, and nine days.
The noise and the people the people the people in that whirlpool became a reflexive complaint for me, one of the many liferights shared by all New Yorkers, but avoiding it was never an object. I haunted the outskirts of those endless intersections—a couple of friends for a couple of years worked at Thomson-Reuters, I was forever getting lunch with one or the other of them. One Valentine’s night I went up at 10pm to comfort a friend on a date gone mortifying, and we ate large doses of medicinal ice cream, cupped without judgment or kindness in the cold, jagged-nailed hand of the city that never sleeps. I darted along 42nd Street on battleship-gray afternoons in a long, flaring black wool coat on my way to the AMC and the Regal farther west, to meet friends at the movies, feeling lighter than air because of how in love I was. (Although I was always more in love at the 67th and 86th Street AMCs.)
Emerging blinking after those blockbusters into evening, into the false again-day, I would head off for the A train, back to a succession of other neighborhoods I called mine. After you’ve been in Times Square, anywhere else in the city feels spacious, even deserted.
The other night, vacillating wildly between my desire to get through the panic-inducing crowds that cannot possibly have been that packed when I lived there, or to just have the anxiety attack and damn the consequences—hardly the first time I quarreled with that urge in that place—I recognized a gathering inside myself. A sternness that formed in me long ago, compressed into being like carbon becoming a diamond through the twinned forces of dissociation and self-regard.
You will navigate this. Look. There is a space to the right. Slip along. That door is opening. Twist. Don’t stop moving. You are the unstoppable force here. Move. Now. Faster. They don’t know what they’re doing. You do. You are here.
That was the knowledge I gloried in during the years my feet always hurt from how hard I pounded those mica-infused pavements, wearing high-heeled boots my ankles would laugh hysterically at now. The knocking of my heels against the sparkling sidewalks comforted me, their echo a triumphant SOS down to Manhattan’s marrow. You are here.
I don’t need that uncompromising certainty for getting through intersections in midtown these days. I use it for foes more worthy of my steel, like death, and professional phone calls. It’s been a long, long time since I crumpled into tears on a regular basis in subway cars, although I did for a minute on Saturday. (Overstimulated and Unafraid: The Miranda Dubner Story.) I’m now usually only in Times Square for the same reasons I was before I moved to the city—on my way to something I want to do. In the last year, Ellis and I ran through it in the pouring rain near midnight, the streets almost entirely empty. We were there in June, the week that smoke from raging wildfires in Canada turned the streets into a dystopian orange-rust hellscape. Buildings were smothered, disappeared. Closer to the ground, acrid dust hung around a larger-than-life promotional statue of Optimus Prime, as if he were regarding the aftermath of battle.
I appreciate forces of nature more now, the ones within and without. Imaginary whirlpools and real wildfires, all require endurance. I know better how to hold on to myself, still, again.
Times Square is the first fear I ever got over. When things were very hard for me in college, I would find myself there, visiting the animatronic T-Rex in Toys ‘R Us. I knew just where to stand to feel that it was staring directly into my eyes. I would pour out my heart in silence, and it would roar back for me. The T-Rex is gone, Toys ‘R Us went bankrupt. I don’t get turned around. You are here is tattooed on my arm.