The sunset from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade is the kind of thing tourists know about and New Yorkers pretend to be too busy for. This week I was neither busy nor too cool, so I went.
I took the 2 to Clark Street, walked past the brownstones that cost more than I will make in ten lifetimes, and found a spot on the railing right as the light started turning.
And oh, the sunset from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in late August is a genuinely unfair amount of beauty for one free public walkway.
The whole of Lower Manhattan lit up gold. The water went pink. Someone's dog kept trying to eat a discarded halal cart napkin. A couple was clearly breaking up two benches down, very quietly, very sadly, and I tried not to eavesdrop and completely failed.
I've lived here two years now. When I first arrived, this skyline felt like a movie set. Like something happening to other people that I'd been allowed to visit. Very Kal Ho Naa Ho, me standing there overwhelmed and slightly out of place.
But sitting there this week, watching the sunset from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, it hit me that it's mine now too. Not in a I-own-it way. In a this-is-where-my-life-is-happening way.
I didn't take a photo. I usually take forty. I'm always composing, always thinking about the feed, always seeing the world through a crop tool because that's the job and also the disease.
But I just sat. Watched the ferries. Watched the light drain out of the buildings one by one until they switched to their own electric version of glowing.
The city does this for free every single evening and most of us are underground on the train when it happens.
Go watch a sunset you didn't pay for. The skyline's been waiting.
Love,