Sunset Over the Water

When I first moved to Manhattan from California three years ago, I traded the view of a palm tree out my bedroom window for a view of the air shaft in my apartment building. I finally moved to my current apartment which has this (above) view out of my living room and bedroom windows. It gives the illusion that I live above "nature," when in fact I live eight floors above eight miles of concrete.

There are certain things about moving to New York that are deeply unsettling, tailored to your previous living experience. For example, my brother-in-law Grant got inexplicably sick for the first three months he lived in the city. He took medicines. He visited the "Eye and Ear Infirmary" in the West Village (which is in itself creepy--what kind of city that's not in the middle of a war has an "infirmary"??) Nothing helped, he just stayed sick until his body decided to get better. Maybe it was the effect of New York's confines on him, he coming from the wide-open mountain west. Or maybe it was his body rejecting New York.

In any case, one thing that left me discombobulated coming from the west was that on the East Coast, the sun doesn't set over the water. To me, this was like water swirling down the drain the wrong direction below the equator--it just isn't right. Living in this apartment gives the *illusion* of the sun setting over the water (Hudson River) and that is, strangely enough, deeply comforting to my little western heart.