Like a pulsating mix of champagne and meteors

A woman like me alone in a city like this spells trouble, which is presumed, and I wish that you were here for the adventure. I love New York City like I will never again love any inanimate object that seems real and breathing to me, she embraces me every time, my passionate lover.

I am seated in patient anticipation. I hear her voice from afar only to come around the curve after Newark and see her brightly dyed hair tumble upon the nape of her bone-white neck in the form of the latest color scheme on the top of the Empire State Building. Her hands stretch out to greet me with a different bauble for every finger of her warm-heart-cold-hands. I leave the train, climb the escalator, step through the automatic doors to 8th Avenue, and am intertwined with her once more. She steals my breath into her mouth and slaps me across the face with her icy January winds for not calling. I love her with all of my heart and I let her seduce me, caressing every part of me, until I look at my cell phone and see it’s after midnight and someone else is awaiting my arrival.

She pouts with her arms suddenly folded, the black lace strap of her bra slipping down over her shoulder, and I put my finger to her blood red lips, Shh, not tonight, but I will be back tomorrow. I’m just as disappointed to leave as she is to see me go, onto the ferry, where she closes her eyes in sorrow like a woman who knows she’s the Other One in my life, and I realize some of her glittering eyeshadow has rubbed off on my cheek. A man next to me thinks I am crying, and maybe I am a little teary at the heartstopping way her skyline is sparkling like a pulsating mix of champagne and meteors; he offers me a handkerchief.

Anyone would be jealous of the way I dream of her at night, the way I think about her throughout days away. In the morning, she awakes me with the memory of her warm deep kisses and here I sit at 9:30am, plotting the hour when I will steal away to my secret lover New York City. Oh, if only you could see us when we’re together…

words ©️Alessandra Nicole 2004

15 years.

I cannot believe that it has been fifteen years.

New Ad

I had to throw together a full page color ad for TEDx Wilmington coming up at the month’s end. 

Early Spring in N-Y-C

A flurry of work meetings and gulps of sunshine today. Snapshots from in and around the 50s- midtown Manhattan where the weather did top off at 72°F this afternoon.  

 

 

 

 

 

Manhattan Wears December

  
    
   

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W. 42nd

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4 years ago… 10 years ago happened

This was from four years ago today… Popped up in my Facebook newsfeed and is worth remembering what I went through, curating a ten year commemorative exhibit (by request) of the biggest event in my life. I definitely got by with a little help from my friends! It was a collaborative effort that included a reading of an award winning off Broadway play and the authentic music of my Kabul-born musician and dear friend.  A well-rounded, personal, deeply intimate event. 

Here is a link to another small interview / article published about my experience: Delaware Photographer’s images of lower Manhattan on 9/11/01 to be exhibited in downtown Wilmington on the 10th anniversary

 

Lower Manhattan, Sky and Skyline

   
   

New York, New York

Enjoyed an unforgettable couple of days in the big apple with an important, beautiful (and camera shy) girlfriend of mine. We stood mere feet away from U2 at Madison Sq Garden (eeeeeee!!!), walked the Brooklyn Bridge, took a ferry ride to see the skyline from the lower Manhattan perspective, strolled through a heavenly italian market in Chelsea (Eataly!) and revisited Ground Zero together, having not been back since everything unfolded around us there on 9/11/01. It was thrilling, deeply memorable, and cathartic. 

   

Parting Shot

I always try to grab a little snapshot of the NYC skyline after emerging from the tunnel in New Jersey.

Though the day was seasonably warm last week when we left the City, it wasn’t remarkable weather. That’s alright though, unremarkable snapshots are fun to play around with using iPhone apps and a friend of mine turned me onto one that gave me this result:

via Instagram @Alessandra_Official

So, who cares? It’s fun. Don’t judge the bad snapshots, use them to experiment. I create something, however small, daily. Sometimes an unremarkable snapshot inspires sketches, paintings, illustrations, short stories, down the line. I open my eyes and explore. That (and a little bit of love) is the stuff of life.

Manhattan abstraction

Whoever said New York City is bleak in winter never looks up!







LalaLexington

59th & Lexington, NYC 

Find Alessandra on Instagram @Alessandra_Official

Rainy Day NYC

Autumnal colour isn’t only found in October foliage! New York City certainly wears the season well. I will take this town rain or shine. Don’t you just love NYC in the fall?

9.11.01 – 9.11.14

May we continue to heal from this event and it’s subsequent aftermath, and continue to rise above and flush out hatred from our world, our homes, and our hearts by continuing to choose love in every precious moment.

day tripper

Near the top of my list of Most Romantic Experiences is taking a train ride up to NYC on a lazy Sunday, just for the day. NY Times in my lap, his head resting on my shoulder, swaying in a train… We arrive comfortable, relaxed and emerge into the city unencumbered by the usual gear, baggage; untethered to any vehicle. Free as a bird. Grab your mate by the hand and try it!

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Posting this from a silver bullet in the shape of a vehicle on its way up the NJTP to New York City where we are spending the weekend; a lil bit of work and a whole lotta play!

The temps are unseasonably warm for October this year but the foliage is still popping with colour! Autumn brings elegant passion and beauty to dying. It’s such a brilliant and tactile season of vibrancy, crunch; the scent of smoke and apples, the gentle contrast of a chill in the evening paired with a renewed and electric awareness of the warmth of your lover’s cheek so close to yours. This is undeniably my most favorite of the four seasons.

12 Years Ago

For me and my family personally, September 11 was a reminder that life is fleeting, impermanent, and uncertain. Therefore, we must make use of every moment and nurture it with affection, tenderness, beauty, creativity, and laughter.
-Deepak Chopra, M.D.

The short story: Today twelve years ago, I became a photographer.

I was working in Washington, DC for the United States Dep’t of Transportation at the time — occasionally I’d be working in our small office located inside of the Pentagon, more often I would be on travel anywhere domestically from Seattle to Miami, LA to Boston. This particular Tuesday I could’ve been on a flight slated for California but hijacked to PA, NY, or VA. I very easily could’ve been sitting in a chair in our office in a wing of the Pentagon.

Instead, I had been assigned to a federal building in lower Manhattan for the week and took the train up with some coworkers from Washington Monday afternoon. I spent a truly carefree evening of September 10th dining and drinking and laughing with a photographer friend of mine in Brooklyn before walking through the World Trade Center plaza on my way to an adjacent hotel for the night.

I was traveling so frequently at the time that my friends and family really had no idea where in the country I was when the news broke- most of them thinking I was at the Pentagon until they finally received word the evening of 9/11/01 that I was in fact in the thick of it in NYC.

Below was my view-from-the-office that morning, the 41st floor of the U.S. Department of Justice, Immigrations and Naturalizations at 26 Federal Plaza on Broadway, a handful of blocks from the World Trade Center. The 2nd plane impacted Tower 1 just a second before this frame was taken. A couple of my coworkers were scheduled to be in our I.R.S. location located inside one of the Twin Towers a couple of days later. I bought all the rolls of Fuji and Kodak the bodega had at ground level after we were evacuated from the building, and, loosely tethered to my coworkers, lived the events as they unfolded around us in a mixture of naked-eye shock and through the viewfinder of my Nikon.

I have had a compulsion to document, archive, appreciate and be fully alive in this precious present ever since.

Brooklyn Bridge

Earlier this week I walked the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time in my life which is stunning only to me because I lived in Williamsburg for a short chapter. In one month I went from the Golden Gate to the Brooklyn Bridge. Not bad 🙂

WTC progress

Here’s a quick Instagram snapshot I made recently of the Freedom tower going up in lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center once stood. Looking solid! Still surreal.

The freedom tower slicing into a Manhattan sky hoping soon to reinvent the Big Apple’s skyline

Umbrella in the Park

Often iPhone photography is fabulous for conjuring new illustration and painting ideas. I treat the pictures I create like a sketchbook and file them in a special place for when I need inspiration at my drawing desk.

St. Thomas, NYC