"The Timid Need Not Apply"

Marcus sent this to me tonight. This part in particular grabbed me:

Often, when you’re young and new to New York, your identity isn’t real yet, just as the city isn’t real yet. It’s a fantasy; it eludes you. You fashion yourself into the person you think will belong. It’s cliché to compare one’s relationship with a city to a love affair, but incomparably apt. We invent ourselves in love, as we do in new places. It makes sense that we often end up serving those who have been here longer, whose selves have solidified into their unromantic reality: the mad, the lonely, the perverse, the rich and miserable. They feel native to us, and they need us.

God, I love NYC. Maybe that makes me a tourist, maybe that makes me someone who should've been there her whole life.