fiefoe

I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—becausedid not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.
... how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve,
You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there.
New York was no mere city. It was instead .. the shining and perishable dream itself.
committed themselves to some reasonable furniture
That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.

'Goodbye to All That' by Joan Didion (Reply)