Goodbye to all that

"(...) quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean
"love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with
the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches
you and never love anyone quite that way again. I remember
walking across Sixty-Second Street one twilight that first spring,
or the second spring, they were all alike for awhile. 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 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 - because I did
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. I
still believed in possibilities back then, still had the sense,
so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen
any minute, any day, any month."

From Goodbye To All That by Joan Didion