So I admit, New York actually is glamorous. The Anyplace Glamorous category was invented for places that have “found” glamour. Or maybe created. But I’m going to let this one through for some reason, just a walk in the dark that wouldn’t make it to the front of the queue if I was making real travel blogs.

Work travel can mean staying in hotels that majorly outclass me. Sometimes waking up and looking out the window can be a glamorous experience.

But there’s a Jedi mind trick that I’ve got  to pull on myself sometimes, to get out and find a little piece of the romanticism of travel when I might have to go alone, and in a way I’m tempted to wish I was back in Texas. Or some place Thom is anyway. Sometimes part of me wants to stay in my tower.

 

 

But there was a kid version of me, with dirty shoes and the ends of my jeans run through the mud, who used to hide out beneath the interstate and watch the headlights pass. The ghost of her won’t let me not see the world where I go.

Sometimes its just a walk.

 

Sometimes its a walk in the quiet past the places that they write songs about. Or just staying a moment under the arch of a church.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes I can wonder for hours, looking for something, unspecific. Maybe its just looking to find something. I don’t know what that is. Maybe its a building in the lights. Or just a cathedral on Facebook.

 

 

At some point looking for something turns into looking for food. Not just anyplace, someplace that feels like there’s an experience there to be discovered.

 

 

I went in because of the red glow and the bicycle in front, but I took the photo badly, and didn’t catch the bike.

Dinner alone is something that I have to put myself in the right frame of mind for, even though I’ve done it often. I decided at some point that I couldn’t let myself be restricted by not having someone to go with me always. Probably when Thom was in Iraq, but I don’t remember a moment for the epiphany, unlike I usually do. Dinner, in a restaurant, can try to shake me from that resolve, because of the feeling of being conspicuous, being observed. (I only like to be conspicuous when I am in control.)

 

 

This one was just me at the tables. The waiter, and the delivery biker, in and out. Its a lonely stage, if its a stage.

 

 

If I were a proper food blogger I’d know what I had, but I don’t remember the menu name. Some kind of salad with tuna and avocado, and a spicy roll. And it was good.

 

 

I ordered Thai ice tea to go. and noticed the place was lucky, on my way out the door.

 

 

 

Sometimes I walk past things that remind me, in these glamorous places, that there were other lives I could have lived. I could have loved something else; could I have loved it the way I love what I do? The way I love what “can’t exist in real life”? Maybe it was a different way to fill the same space, anyway.

 

 

I ended that night drinking Thai iced tea in a room so much classier than I am, remembering to remember how cool it is to get to be there, and how cool it is to want to go home too. So that is what they call happy time.