sometimes nyc feels like this:

[starfrosting]

"Cypress fought admitting it, but Leroy had mediated her relationship with the City of New York. She couldn't stand it when he was gone. His horns and his arms offered her horizons where she was free to see what she chose, feel what she had to, be what she dreamed. Now she was constrained by cement, noise, thousands of people she'd never had to take seriously. Whole blocks of black people without trees. Dance studios that looked into other dance studios. Or vacant lots crammed with tires, garbage, used strollers, broken bottles, and stench. Leroy alone had shielded her from this. Now her landscape had no natural elements. In California, one was cognizant of the planet: that the earth and sea were forces to contend with. New York without Leroy was bereft of any humility, dwarfing the sun, violating the waters, crowding nature into a yard called Central Park."
(----ntozake shange, sassafrass, cypress & indigo)