to span the length of the isle of manhattan

When I first moved in to my apartment, when it was just me and my $40 IKEA bed, I put up pictures with sticky tack around my bedroom to liven the place up. I have an overhang above my bed (that I suspect once held a runner for a sliding door) that was the piece-de-resistance of the whole thing, with four-by-six pictures running all the way across.

For about three months now, the pictures have been coming loose and, slowly, one at a time, falling down. At first I tried to fight it, climbing up on my bed and re-rolling the sticky tack between my thumb and index finger hoping to create some new-found sticking power and smacking the picture back up in its place.

I soon realized that resistance was futile, and so I just started letting the pictures fall. And somewhere in my mind I had this feeling that when all the pictures finally fell off the wall, it would be time for me to leave New York.

So I've let them fall, and as they've shown up on the floor or lying on my bed in the morning when I wake up, I've grabbed them and stashed them in different drawers and amid papers, as if to create little surprises for myself when I do start packing this place up. Lately, the pictures have been falling faster and more frequently, and though there are still quite a few hanging on to their spots on the wall, the fallen photos serve to remind me of two things -- on bad days, they remind me that it won't be that much longer before I'm out of here, and on good days they remind me to cherish the time I have left in this city.

So yesterday, when I saw that my boss hadn't scheduled me to work on Saturday for the first time in months, I decided to use the unexpected free morning to do some much needed cherishing of this city. I may not have tons of money to spend here to enjoy all the fabulous things New York has to offer, but what I do have are my eyes and my feet. So next Saturday, I'm going to walk the length of the island of Manhattan. It's about 13 miles, and from what I can tell in the little research I've done (and some basic math) takes about five hours to complete. I'm going to start from 215th Street at the northernmost tip of the island and walk down Broadway for most of the journey, save the stretch I'll do down the edge of Central Park.

I'll be taking pictures, but mostly taking it all in -- hopefully I'll have something profound to say when it's all done to show for it.


cheers,
elizabeth