It is a strange thing to love a city. In the end because no city is entirely knowable. What you love really are pieces of it. You are like Dr. Aadam Aziz forever peering at sections of his beloved through the perforated sheet. In Midnight’s Children the sheet was finally dropped and the beloved revealed, but with cities that never happens. That is perhaps part of the allure, what brings us back to the cities we love: our desire to accumulate enough pieces so we can finally have it whole within us. But to love a city is also to love who we were at that time we fell in love. For me, my love for Tokyo is intertwined with my love for my best friend, who did, in the end, survive his surgery.
- Junot Diaz, 'Junot Diaz Reflects on Tokyo'
For me, my love for New York City is intertwined with the lost child who had nothing but the written word as faithful companion, with that first reassurance that I’m perfectly fine the way I am, with old friends of the rare breed that compels respect who have been absorbed into the emotional space I identify as home. ‘Home’ is an amorphous tag that means both nothing and everything, and, whether or not I finally learn to lay my roots down in the city that’s called me back since youth, I hope I never lose this feeling of loving a city that’s always forgiven me and offered me the hope I so desperately needed when I was spiralling down the abyss.