This was my first time ever in NYC and Times Square. It was the day after graduating high school and we arrived to our hotel late afternoon. They told us we could walk around the hotel a bit as long as we were in pairs or more. It was 2003, we didn’t have Google Maps so honestly, I didn’t really know where we were in the city. We turn a corner and head down a block past the many “adult stores” lol —- that’s still the case on 8th Ave midtown let’s be honest....when we reached the end of the block we were directly in front of the old Virgin store smack dab in the middle of Times Square, and my breath was completely taken away. There is nothing that compares to that first time. It was then and there that I told anyone that would listen that I would live in NYC some day but it wasn’t the lights, the energy or even the distance from TN that made me say that. It was the immediate independence I saw everywhere. I didn’t need to be in a “pair” to live and New York was the first place I had ever been that seemed to understand and accept that. I may not live there now (though some may say I’m there enough to seem like I still do...true) but for 13 years I did and for 13 years I learned more and more about myself in the city that celebrated me doing it MY way.