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[Tamela Vandonsel]

The dilapidated apartment building in which I live is just a few streets north of the empress trees. I spend most of my free time there, but like a restless house cat I have my regular patrols. Sunday mornings, I take Smith Street up to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where, from the tall wrought-iron fence that overlooks the East River, I can take in my entire city-bound life. (There is the skyscraper where I work, here is my favorite bar, that is where my best friend lives.) Other times I walk to Brooklyn Bridge Park and around Pier 6, circling a rotating neon sign that reads UNDERSTANDING, which narrowly avoids seeming self-serious because it is twenty-five feet tall and therefore impossible to read from up close.

Once walking became my primary form of exercise, I started thinking about the time spent on these excursions in isolation from the rest of my life, as though they were one long looping GIF. I began to measure my walking life not in hours spent on the pavement but in, say, the number of shuttered storefronts along Atlantic Avenue or by the absence of a huge, leafy fig tree that had been leveled to a stump when I went to look for it last autumn. Living in New York means learning not to mourn your landmarks too much. You accept shifting as part of the landscape.

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