I sat down late last week and pulled out a box full of photos. Many of my photos have been lost in move from the south to California to Maine to New York, shuffling them around in storage while on tour or out of the country, and from countless moves from hellhole New York apartment to less-hellhole New York apartment and back again. Further, I’m not even really much of a photographer. I have a digital camera now but I remember to bring it along to appropriate functions about every 5th time. Still, I’ve managed to amass quite a collection of photos from college, grad school and beyond. The other day, I started going through them and, aside from the shock of seeing just how huge I used to be, I realized just how many people have come into my life and out again, and also how many are still in it.

As a transplanted New Yorker, I am often absolutely floored at the number of people I know in this city whom I knew before any of us moved here. This is truly a remarkable place. My very first weekend living in the city, I wandered through Times Square and quite literally bumped shoulders with a girl from graduate school (she was a class ahead of me) and neither of us knew the other lived here. I later ran into a grand total of 4 people in Times Square, people who should not have been there and, even more, I shouldn’t have managed to bump into them in the sea of people flowing through the area.

Back to the people still in the city…
I moved to NYC several years ago and completely on my own. Two friends drove cross-country with all of our stuff in a U-Haul, we divvied it up and, oddly, said our goodbyes. I still see them but it’s incredibly infrequent and that bond is long gone. Essentially, I was here alone. I spent a very short time in the city before beginning my performing career and spending the next year and change everywhere but NYC. When I moved back permanently, I began to notice a slow trickle of old friends into the city. Two of my best friends from college moved here and I even lived with them for a short while. From grad school, I eventually lived with a former classmate and we were 5 short blocks from the apartment of three other grad friends. Another lived in Hell’s Kitchen, three in the West Village.
Before long, I had a set of small circles of friends from home and school living in New York. Some of them have fallen by the wayside (well, they moved away, anyway) and have been replaced by new arrivals as well as newly-made friends in the city. It amazes me nonetheless that NYC is such a connector of the threads of my life and the friendships therein.
And now I vow to carry my camera around more often and have NYC memories to carry me wherever I may go next.