The rain held off for as long as it could. I was pregnant with sweat not quite ready to burst, and so was the sky, but the sky came to term. So I had to head back from Brooklyn.
Brooklyn felt different, or at least, I felt different in Brooklyn. It felt like the stakes had been lowered. On Manhattan, you are trapped in an endless maze of towers. It’s the maze aspect that’s most important: You will only walk in straight lines, turn perpendicularly at predetermined nodes. Central Park’s zigs and zags somehow reinforce that--planned spontaneity is still planned. And Manhattan’s endlessness ends abruptly. The East River and Hudson are thick black lines, nothing gets past them. There are infinities of various sizes, and Manhattan’s is a very small one, when you get down to it.
Brooklyn was still a maze. Brownstone streets met other brownstone streets and the network of slightly-too-narrow sidewalks were my only means of traversing them. But there was something lush, something wrung, something contorted. The word I am looking for is sprawling. I got off of the station and headed down Flatbush Avenue, the Botanical Garden to my left and Prospect Park to my right. Trees covered me intermittently from intermittent sun, idyll stinking of motor oil. And I could not turn, I could only move forward. But it was different than Manhattan. I could not see nor even imagine where Flatbush ended. I could not see where the garden on ended, where the park ended. I felt in the midst of sprawl, splayed out on the page and stretched thin across the map. There are infinities of various sizes, and Brooklyn’s is a very large one, when you get down to it.
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