When I was a kid, we went to New York City once a year, minimum. My mom loved Broadway, as did I, and beyond that, the glamour! The lights and the coffee shops and the freaks of nature beautiful and queer and cool that I never saw in Bumfuck, PA. I dreamed of myself someday living there amongst them, so casually lovely I barely existed. Bowl cut grown out into a bob more severe than my mother’s, sitting in a coffee shop drinking something frothy I can’t pronounce, writing at a typewriter I’d lugged out there from my glamorously miniscule New York apartment. I was, most definitely, “that” kid.

This destiny abruptly shifted when I turned 13, and I fought that.

For the first time that year the clamor seemed to rattle my bones. The lights were too many, the lovely freaks too colorful. Broadway was cool as ever, but the best part was the silent darkness before it started, relief, that dark stillness a balm over my overstimulated consciousness.

I could tell it had changed. That I had changed; become weaker. I hated it.

We were in our same hotel on the 32nd or some odd floor. My mom and sister wanted to go down to breakfast. The thought of it made me squirm in my skin, so I said I needed to sleep. They left, and I opened the window.

The smells alone were overpowering.

There was a little ledge where an air conditioner used to sit before the hotel had gone central, and I didn’t think much about it, I just wanted to see it all in a way that didn’t hurt me, I climbed out on that ledge and sat and I was suddenly above it all rather than drowning in it, and I could see little people smaller than my pinky fingernail, and the smells formed one blanket, and-

My mom inside: I forgot my- WHAT ARE YOU DOING??

I almost fell.

I was already climbing back in by the time she reached me, but she grabbed me anyway, and her fingernails dug into my skin like the smells did, and I hated it.

“I just wanted to see, I just,”

The lecture was frantic and terrified. She didn’t let me alone again. We never went back to NYC; went on a trip with dad the next year, the beach the year after that, Florida, and then she was dying.

The fear never had time to leave her eyes. Her nails dug into me, and I flinched.

The next time I went to NYC I was in my early 20s and helping a friend move and it had lost all its glamour for my sensitive mind and heart. Everything I had loved had grown to hurt me; the lights were abrasive, the people too many, and the tall buildings resembled hives rather than lives.

The smell choked me, and leaving was an ordeal.

Sometimes I hear about a show and I think, “maybe someday.” Sometimes my kid loves the music from one of those shows and I think, “probably someday.”

They’ve started coming to Philly tho, so. Maybe not.