City Snapshot

I saw a photo this morning in a collection. A girl stood looking out a window, with a 30th floor view of a city.
I knew that view. I stood there once, in a midtown hotel in New York. Stood there with my face against the floor-to-ceiling window, taking it all in. Feeling like one face among millions, all of us falling in love with the city. My eyes shifting from landmark to avenue, admiring the flow of it all. The lights in different colors; the architecture of the Chrysler Building; the streets dwindling to a maze along the south side. The warm certainty of anonymity, like a craving.
A different slice of the city from my usual, that of a second story alley-view.
But still, that echo sits in me, that love of being unknown. Being swallowed up whole by a place and welcoming it.
Maybe I've always been fighting myself. Armored against being known, by the sheer willingness to be unknown. I've been in the market for an invisibility cloak all along. I've run away from the small places and hurried to the large places, desperate to be a stranger.
On weekends I want to leave my city and go to a city that is completely new, an area I have never walked and cannot be known. It is my version of wanderlust. The nothingness.
Maybe that's why I anchored myself with family.
One for each point of the compass.
In case I wander into the wind and sand and the pure comfort of a new experience each and every day.