I may have given you the impression that New York is a guy, considering all of the ways that she can and does fuck me. I may have given you the impression that I like to bend over and take it up the ass. I may have written about this big, urban, overwhelming city such that you think that she just straps it on and goes to town.

And she does, I suppose. She does like to work her hips like a piston, that inhale-exhale of her slit pouring out like a faucet. And sometimes I do like to take in, like to nourish, like to actively receive. But she is not all cock, she is not all penetration and action and fucking to completion. She is not all take take take with no give.

Sometimes she fucks me like a river fucks a landscape, singular silt sediment by singular silt sediment, each grain of sand being pulled away from the embankment one at a time, tumbling through tumultuous turning while cartwheeling underwater. Sometimes she fucks me like the rain fucks the earth, with that question of whether I’m falling or flying. Sometimes I wake and throw back the shades to fill my room with light and just beg for a good hard pounding, a thick day to come along and loosen up all the things I’m keeping inside, rattling and incomplete.

New York can do that for me.

And sometimes there is such tenderness in her grasp. Sometimes she teaches me lessons I have always wanted to know and am deeply afraid of. Sometimes she cradles me, rocks me to sleep, shows me things from high up where I can see the neat lines of organization, the grids and one-way streets, the easy silence behind the chaos.

There are times when I just need it hard, you know? Where I can’t stand waiting around through yet another mediocre finger fuck, hoping that my G-spot and clit will get hit just right for just long enough that I’ll get that sweet release. Sometimes I need to know it’s going to be pounded out of me. Taken, beat, demanded. Sometimes that sweet kind gentle hand will not do it.

Yeah, so she can work a strap-on. So she can fuck the piss out of me when I need it, or sometimes when I don’t need it, bordering on non-consensual, which is what makes me so mad at her sometimes. But she can hold me, too. She can hold all of this chaotic ambition I bring to her streets. She can hold the dozens and dozens of people I meet, all with our entourage of different ensemble bands, jazz or syncopated or rock or improvisational or orchestral bliss, marching from bar to bookstore with our own beats behind us. Lighting up subway cars and not even asking for a donation.

Other cities couldn’t hold us all, couldn’t tell us how to keep pushing ourselves, couldn’t show us the thimble-sized ways we fucked up our last project. But this one can, this one does. It can hold us all, give us just the right amount of room and just the right about of push so I can chrysalis myself into a new version of all the possibilities of what I might become.

And if that one isn’t right, I just set out again to do it all over.

It can be exhausting. It can be exhilarating. It can break me open and make me scream for the easier days of other cities I’ve lived in, where the quality of life is higher and the struggle is not so great. But with this great struggle comes great rewards. And sometimes, just sometimes, the reward becomes something so rare and precious that it is worth it to stick around, just to see if I can recreate the circumstances, and become myself anew again.