I’m a New Yorker. It is in my blood, my soul, the way I move, the way I think, the way I believe I am supposed to be and achieve; and it is the pulse of who I am. Above all else, being a New Yorker is a responsibility in the same way that being a Texan is a responsibility and being an Arizonan is sometimes not.
I am a New Yorker out of New York, and that is a different flavor of responsibility entirely. When I lived in the city I thought very little of the America that existed outside of the tri-state area. I considered Chicago in brief. I called it a sister city–New York of the Midwest and a little brother to our Gotham. I walked around with the arrogant belief that I lived in the greatest city in the world. I’m still convinced NYC is the best. My travels prove it is the greatest city in the United States at least. However, now I’m a post-New Yorker. Now I keep running into all these folks from New York (Maricopa is crawling with New Yorkers), and I’m left to answer the questions of the city, the questions of why I left, and the biggest question: What do you do After New York?
You become a representative of what people believe that place to be.
I am a meme. Whereever I go I carry the weight of a city, a race, an ideal. It is a responsibility that we each bear, often without ever thinking about it. People judge each other based on their perceptions about the visual and verbal baggage that person brings into the first meet. I’m judged in one sense because I’m black, in another because of how I dress and what I do, and another still because of where I come from. Since I carry love and respect for that place and what it did for me, I try to live up to the standard that it set while I was there. Yet another thing easier said than done.