Almost a year later, I look back on my summer in New York City with a sometimes crushing sense of nostalgia. At risk of sounding wildly cliche, those memories are some of the most bittersweet that I can imagine. There's a ghost, one comprised of my memories, that follows me around even now. I want you to feel my ghost too - I want you to be left with a sense of haunting in the same way I have. Maybe that's more important than telling the actual story anyway.
So when I tried to write my autobiography - again and again, never capturing what I needed to capture to make it right - that formative summer became dominated by my experience with the trains. I didn't like New York City, just to be clear. But I learned to love the trains almost immediately: those huge iron beasts that are simultaneously so claustrophobic and so freeing. Even when the streets terrified me and my own apartment felt further from home than I ever could have imagined, something about the trains enraptured me. The motion, the rhythm, the way that they have a personality of their own - some dependable, some unreliable, some fast, some clean.
When I saw this footage, the old trains with their own peculiar ghost themselves, I was immediately drawn into a black hole of recollection. I imagine all New Yorkers - natives, transplants, expatriates - feel the same way about trains.
So rather than telling my story, I create for you a ghost. There have been many more interesting stories better told, but I hope to achieve the effect of such a story in a shorter time. I hope you will feel the bittersweet as I do, know the haunting as intimately as I have.
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