A.N. I own nothing and make no profit; please don't sue me. And yes, I am working on my WIPs. Sorry I've been absent for awhile; Classic Doctor Who (especially Four/Sarah Jane) ate my brain. The title refers to the fact that Milton Glaser (and less famously, Bobby Zarem) created the famous 'I Heart NY' logo.
Alex Eames loves New York.
It's not that she's bought the hype—she's knows it's no magical city of opportunity, streets paved in gold with Broadway producers handing out callbacks on every corner, firefighters and policemen heroically carrying babies out of burning buildings every third block.
She just—loves it. Loves the brownstones and the skyscrapers and the ferry, the Starbucks on every corner and the people who push past her on the sidewalk. Loves the sound of the turnstiles on the subway and the shops where she used to buy cherry suckers and all the people in Greenwich Village who still think Greenwich Village is on the cutting edge. Loves the rising hum of the city gearing up to meet the day, a hum interspersed with clangs and bangs and whistles and shrill mechanical shrieks and a hundred thousand arguments in a hundred thousand languages.
It's not a habit and it's not nostalgia. It just is. A simple and unassailable fact.
She loves Times Square at New Years Eve, and she loves her father playing poker with all his old cop buddies in his favorite dingy bar where the countertop is always slightly sticky and the red plastic booth seat covers always torn, and she loves the radio station she listens to on the way to work, drumming her fingers on the wheel and looking out the window. At too-expensive apartments and shitty pizza places and a breakfast diner that wants her to believe it serves authentic Southern grits.
At Chinese restaurants, banks, leaking trash bags, used condoms stuck to the sidewalk, churches, and a community garden.
Graffiti and abandoned soda pop bottles and theatre lights and the sea.
God help her, she even loves the smell.
Well, when the wind's not blowing from Jersey.