Kiera rests her head against a carelessly framed advertisement as the dying strains of some wistful indie rock song emanate through her earbuds, the singer’s lowly baritone drowning beneath the cacophonous rattling and screeching of the subway car. Through its cracked windows, she stares out mindlessly as the gleam of the evening makes its way over the snow-sprinkled city, complimenting the red-bricked Brooklyn streets with a gentle, wondrous lustre. Kiera, however, sees no such beauty in the city’s novel, albeit transitory sheen. The snow, to her, seemed to powder a tinge of lifelessness on everything; it made the world number, more subdued, deprived it of any ounce of excitement or wonder it had to offer. In that regard, she half-pondered a question whose prospective answer seemed to constantly elude her, one that she had previously deemed too abstract and perhaps too frightening to answer; where had that spirit – of the city, of the world, of that vision of oneself held in the elegiac sanctities of the mind – where had it gone? Where had she lost that instinctual vitality that once flowed within her as though they composed the very vessels of her blood?
As the train crossed over the Manhattan Bridge, with rosy beams of sunlight flickering through the girders, Kiera observes the awe-inspiring skyline emerging in the distance and, for a brief moment, she stumbles upon a grain of nostalgic fervour. The innocent, naïve Kiera of two years prior had left behind her family and friends in her pastoral English hometown to pursue a film degree from New York University. She had virtually no reason to leave her life behind in Great Britain, and neither did she possess any particular resentment for the place. But something about New York City drew her in like nothing ever had before. The city seemed to flower for her in her mind, compelling her into some romantic complexion and enchanting her with the greatest of all human dreams: the prospect and the wonder of a brave new world. When she first arrived in the city, she had glanced out her baggage-filled taxi and seen that very same skyline emerging over the horizon, and for that single fleeting moment, she had held her breath in its wondrous presence; its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty and endless possibility the world had to offer. She had been so captivated by the wonder of life, so eager to untie Manhattan and, in so doing, to finally discover something commensurate to her capacity for greatness. For the very first time in her life, she had stood face-to-face with everything she had ever wanted, and by the mere stretching of her hand, she leapt out to it and refused to let it go.
However, as the mediocrity of reality set in, that promise was broken. And as the Kiera of the present-day descends from the elevated tracks into the dark subterranean tatterdemalion of tunnels through which the N train raced, tears begin to well in her eyes, for she had everything she had ever wanted and knew she would never be so happy again.
* * *
Kiera squeezed through the stuffy, overflowing tunnels of Eighth Street station, shuffling through the crowds of disgruntled commuters and clueless tourists with the stoic, restless agility of a tried-and-true New Yorker. Rushing up its green steps with impressive speed, she marched west along the narrow pavement towards Washington Square Park on the way back to her apartment. She had always thought the fountains of the park to be rather peculiar; she thought the spewing hems of water had a certain liveliness to them, in the way they danced and fluttered so orderly and eloquently, even amidst the chaos of the frolicking children, eccentric buskers, and scuttling passers-by that surrounded it. A part of her yearned to stop at the park, to throw herself into its evening flurry where she might feel its energy against her skin and lose herself in the vitality of the place, but alas, she marches on with little presence about her, robotically cutting through pockets of vivacious laughter and bustling conversation before arriving at her claustrophobic four-thousand-a-month Greenwich Village studio.
After throwing her keys onto a nearby table and carelessly pouring herself a cup of tea, Kiera shuffles to her dishevelled desk and slumps into the chair, savouring her final moments of mediocre but, more importantly, absentminded existence before forcing herself to work on a film project she had been procrastinating for weeks. With a few flicks of her mouse and a moment of dramatic silence, her computer springs to life, revealing a labyrinthine interface of multi-coloured buttons that was her professional video editing suite. Mindlessly, she imports several clips from her hard drive and slowly assembles them in the timeline before stumbling upon a clip she had seemingly imported by accident. Its title read ‘Spy Girls – Adventures in New York City’ and, out of curiosity, Kiera loaded the clip and clicked ‘play’.
A series of cheap visual effects set to a no-copyright ‘reimagining’ of the James Bond theme gave way to a shot of thirteen-year-old Kiera (or ‘Agent Nightwood’) wearing a trench coat, plastic martini glass and cardboard pistol in hand. Twenty-year-old Kiera chuckled to herself and smiled nostalgically, evidently remembering the cheesy action flick she had made with her childhood best friends, Nora and Ellie, those seemingly centuries-ago. When those same friends appeared on the screen – Nora the presumptuous protégé and Ellie the far-fetched supervillain – Kiera’s head tilted and her eyes began to glisten; her nostalgia giving way to a deep feeling of melancholia. She had not seen Nora or Ellie since she had left for New York City, and their friendship, though still flourishing, had since transitioned from the sands of Brighton Beach and the elegant streets of London to the hurried script on ink-stained letters and the twelve-point Helvetica on instant messenger screens. As ambitious as she was, she had never been the type to embrace change with open arms, and deep down, she knew that some part of her never fully accepted the fact that the promise of the city often came with an incomprehensible emotional void between oneself and those dearest to them. Most of all, however, despite its incoherent storyline and its trite, unsophisticated acting, the film reminded a tearful Kiera of how much she had loved making videos and telling stories, how she had romanticised New York City even when her understanding of it was closer to an absurd abstraction than something concrete and realistic, and how both of those things now rested in the palms of her hand, removed at last from youthful idealism and thrust into the fabric of reality. Through bouts of tears, Kiera searches for the brilliant blue of Agent Nightwood’s eyes and, meeting her gaze, she smiles deeply. With reticence, the special agent nods, as though in affirmation, and Kiera knows she is proud.
* * *
It’s midnight. The silvery lights of the Washington Square Arch illuminate the snowflakes sprinkled across Kiera’s woollen overcoat. She stands amidst the quiet grandeur of the place, watching her warm breath burst into the frigid winter air and admiring the twinkling strings of lights draped across the trees. At that moment, she looked upon the glimmering city with the wonder of a child and felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, in all its innumerable, enigmatic variations. She knows then that she has everything she has ever wanted, a feeling made only stronger by the knowledge that tomorrow she would run faster, stretch her arms higher, for it is the process she has always loved, the very joy of realising her boundless potential. Elegantly, Kiera drapes herself onto a nearby park bench, smiling as she immerses herself in the snow-caked landscape before her. Then she scoops up a mound of snow and playfully throws it into the sky, watching its snowflakes twinkle in the gentle incandescence of the streetlamps as they cascade down to the ground. She has never felt more alive.
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