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Descriptive Essay - New York City in the Morning

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A violin song pulls us out of sleep, dreams of trains and pineapples, like a silk rope. He notices the morning light come to the wall. In the city we left only a few days ago, we learned about waking up before dawn, not to the light, but to the stirring that moves the blood in our thighs and hands. The morning was ancient before the sun even rose.

Rising early in New York City allows you to hear the birds on the street. When we emerged from the tight doorway leading out of the apartment, I saw that the color of the sidewalk and street matched the tone of the sky. A perfectly unassuming shade to provide backdrop for the yellow taxis and traffic signals. Scuff went out heels of our cowboy boots over the sparkling sidewalk. Sparkling with …show more content…

Now, at this hour of the morning when most of the city is just turning in for the night, we are awake to witness the changing of traffic signals with no cars on the road. Just a couple in boots and a street full of birds and empty taxi cabs.

The city is awake inside Penn station. We sit down right in the middle of the platform and tell each other stories about trains. I want to sit down and talk all the lost history like that deserving lover, writes Michael Ondaatje. There is a lot of history to tell each other so we begin at haphazard places, bouncing off new scenes we stumble upon. Trains. I want him to know about how I visit my family in North Carolina by taking the train down from Union Station to Raleigh. Even the plastic cup of fresh squeezed orange juice we bought for breakfast reminds me of places I have been that I want to tell him. We stumble over our histories, not awkwardly, but with the kind of joyful clumsiness and fervor of having too many layers of clothing to take off.

Riding the train with my forehead pressed up against the window as we passed over the city from high up on a bridge, I thought about Mama's street in Bensenhurst. The city lay out beneath the railroad tacks in a limited palette of brown and gray. The first thing I noticed when we emerged from the apartment this morning were these dirt tones. When Mama told me about her neighborhood, I always pictured

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