Small

By Paul Ford

A New York moment of no note.

Looking into a 4"x4" magazine called Wipe, given away free at the Strand on Fulton Street, I found a photo spread of people at an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and suddenly recognized the circular mirror and whitewashed brick wall in the picture. I'd been there, and knew one of the women in the spread. She was the roommate of a friend of a friend, one of those standard connections, absolutely the kind of person to show up unexpected in a magazine in New York. In the photos she and her peers were smiling, cooking, having a good time in expensive designer clothing, the clothing identified in the captions. Then I remembered a further connection: the woman in the photo used to work at a web development company with my close friend Eli. I'll have to tell him about this.

The world is closing in; the world is as big as it ever was. Joan Didion left New York because there were no new faces at the parties; is this the first, long-distant echo of something that will smack me full-on at 30, the realization that the place is run out, that my voice is stale to the ears of the people to whom I'm speaking , that too many people have met and become bored with me? There are 8 million people here, 1000 languages spoken, parks with dog runs and museums with mastodons. If I run out of New York, where will I go?