Hanging by a thread (or a giant mental chain)

I watched "Memoirs of a Geisha" last night. I've read the book too, a couple of years ago I guess. Eh. Not great literature, and vaguely icky, no? I felt like every other paragraph contained "...and then she took off her obi." Anyway, there's a scene where (apparently like all geishas), the main character has to sell her virginity to the highest bidder. Virginity, apparently, commands a high price. The extraordinary value placed on virginity across space and time is something I've never really understood. It's unlike other firsts, such as landing a man on the moon. We weren't sure we could do that before Neil Armstrong...I'm fairly certain everyone knows a girl can have sex before she loses her virginity. Even the idiom is odd: "losing." Losing what? It's not like you are spoiled afterwards, in some way less than you were before.

But...

I don't think that's true for sex. But I wonder if it might be true for love; that after the someone or something you love first, nothing else will ever quite measure up. I've thought about that a lot with New York. I almost hated the city when I was little. Irate business men swearing and the homeless sleeping on stoops: Norman Rockwell did not portray these for a reason. But by middle school my friends and I got in the habit of spending hours and hours wandering up and down a 2 mile stretch of Broadway, and I was in love.

And ruined. Objectively, the architecture is better in Paris, as is the landscape in San Francisco. But I sit at the crossroads of knowing something and feeling it's true. Maybe like most (all?) loves, this one's irrational. How could anything feel better than this? The ability to fall into the narrative of one of eight million lives (what peril!). And the beauty...there's too much to go around. If I wrote poems about New York, I'd want them to sound the way Woody Allen's movies feel. Maybe with some "Sex & the City" mixed in to make them, you know, hotter.

I worry (maybe wrongly) that if you visit the city, you don't have the sense of relaxation I think people who live here feel. Movies make it look like a playground, and it can be. But what I like most about it is the repose I feel here. Home. Much as our parents tend to ruin us for our futures, New York has ruined me for my future homes, little h.