" couldn’t stop smiling—my writing was going to appear in the New York Times! Great Manhattan was a hedge-maze of desire that afternoon, I saw grace in every blade of grass and passing taxi. Gleeful, I was witness to a million passages and alleys: stepping-stones traversing parks to brick walkways beneath glassy high-rise headquarters, industrial lofts transformed into homes and powdered sugar I would never taste in bakeries I’d never enter, and fortune tellers I would not speak to—too many paths to ever walk them all. And for the first time in my life, the road I walked appeared exactly as the road I’d choose. Every pipe dream I’d imagined felt five times more possible. Wandering cobblestone streets, I glimpsed a metal staircase off West Fourteenth Street, rising from the center of the sidewalk, a shaded vision. Of course I climbed it, upward—to the top. I found myself on a walkway in the sky, clouds surreal "

― Aspen Matis , Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir