Safe!

What is it about NYC and this time of the year? Last year on the 14th of Aug we had the now infamous blackout.(Yah I have my own story to relate about the whole thing, something which I wrote about last year and will post on this blog sometime soon.)
Today there was something again?? This time it was in the Ernst & Young building, right next door to us, in Times Square...The building had been evacuated, but there were not too many cops outside it. So maybe it's not serious, we all thought and said out aloud to each other.
Cut to last year, same time when we heard about the power outage. Same reactions, different people. On the outside everyone was positive that it was only a casual incident but within, everyone worried if it was'nt the terrorists at it again.
Both the times, there were those typical cases of paranoia; last year, when someone could'nt get in touch with his boyfriend ( yah, there's no typo there) during the blackout and today when a paranoid, otherwise shy lady, in a step outrageous to her demeanor, picked up her bags and left to go home, way too early in the day, right under the bosses' nose. Soon we were to know that it was a freight elevator accident and that there had been one unfortunate death in the incident.
What can I say? It's New York!! Things happen here and you have to live here knowing that.

Someone said to me the other day; "Why do we need to go through all this insecurity and uncertainty, feeling "unsafe" so often...this city isnt even "ours" to being with!"
That attitude really made me wonder....When do we say a city is "ours"? How long do we need to have lived in it to do so? How attached do we have to be to the city we're living in? How well do we need to know it, to love it?
These are questions similar to those, we ask of ourselves in relationships.
When we live somewhere and love living there, should'nt we accept the city whole heartedly? With all it's qualms and goodies, it's a package deal. With comfort and fame comes constant danger and threat. It's just the attitude we choose to sport, to deal with these things.
Familiarity brings comfort. Sometimes the more we know a city, the more we love it. When there's love, there's loyalty, no matter what...then may the love be a person or a place. And then all our life, we belong there, if not wholly, maybe partially. We start using a "my" before the "city". Whether we continue to live there or not. When the city hurts, we hurt. .. That is when we become "of" it.
Distance does'nt hinder that emotion. We dont have to be in a city, to be in love with it. Our attachment to a city is independent of our living in it. It's circumstantial, in some cases, that we may end up living in it for the maximum time of our lives. Or in some other cases, we may need to live there for a day to know that this is where we belong, this is what we can call "ours"
"Ours" may not be where we were born or raised. "Ours" is where we choose it to be and want it to be! "Ours" is what we call home. And when we are home, we are safe!

GOOD WATCH: Manhattan