New York City always seemed perfection itself — the unattainable ideal that you kept pursuing despite a thousand slights and indignities thrown your way by the indifferent metropolis. Now, given some distance, time, and some beach-adjacent housing in L.A., you realize the five boroughs really aren't so mystically vibrant as you made them out to be. In fact, the whole city seems like a subtly malign joke for anyone who's not either very young or very, very rich.
In this respect, NYC is kind of like the over-buxom cheerleader most every guy slavishly bows down to during high school. You check the yearbook ten years later, and you find she was rather more pedestrian looking than you recall — and not even your type anyway.
I agree, that cheerleader was definitely not my type, and she doesn’t look nearly as good as I recall her looking…still wish I had managed to find my way under her little skirt at some point, though. 😉
Most of the cheerleaders I knew were pretty in the proper setting, but at night, or on a weekend, they turned into drug-addled, drunken trash. You could probably say this about NYC, too.