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The crossroads of the gilded years

  • Writer: Alice Kim
    Alice Kim
  • 1 day ago
  • 2 min read


Author: Annie


When the heels of my shoes first knocked on the granite floor of Fifth Avenue, I was sure that I was stepping on the keys of time. The July sun was like molten gold, pouring down from the spire of the Empire State Building, casting the diamonds in the Tiffany window into a flowing galaxy. This is not a movie set, but a utopia woven with reality - each glass curtain wall reflects twenty kinds of life, and each bronze revolving door hides an unfinished legend.


The Rockefeller Center in the morning mist is like a suspended crystal palace, and the flags of sixty countries flutter in the wind into colorful waves. The old gentleman in the camel hair coat buckled the pocket watch chain into the third button of his suit, a move that has continued since the economic crisis in 1929; the teenager wearing fluorescent headphones and skateboarding passed under the pointed arch of St. Patrick's Church, shaking the Gothic rose window into ripples of electronic sound effects. In the face-to-face relationship between Cartier and Apple flagship stores, I saw an 18th-century enamel pocket watch and AR glasses completing a time-space dialogue in the window.


At noon, I stopped at the south entrance of Central Park, and the light spots filtered by the sycamore leaves danced flamenco on the marble exterior wall of Prada. The lady in red-soled shoes threw the Chanel 2.55 behind her shoulder, and the arc drawn by the metal chain just caught the light and shadow cast by the Greek goddess statue on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wandering singer played "New York Autumn" on the saxophone, and the notes hit the mirrored exterior wall of the Trump Building, breaking into hundreds of miniature versions of the Statue of Liberty and falling into the coffee paper cup of the deliveryman.


The avenue really woke up after dusk. The ice blue LED light strips in the Lexus showroom suddenly resonated with the pearl necklace of Van Cleef & Arpels, and the Tiffany blue box expanded into a hot air balloon in the neon. I stood a few floors below the crystal sailboat of the Louis Vuitton flagship store - in those lighted windows of Bronx, could someone be trying on the black dress in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"? When the giant screen in Times Square switched to an advertisement for a new Broadway play, the whole street suddenly turned into flowing champagne, and even the fire hydrants began to spray golden foam.


At this moment, my shadow was being kneaded into the asphalt of Fifth Avenue, along with Marilyn Monroe's subway vent skirt, Hemingway's cigar ash, and Andy Warhol's canned soup labels, becoming the newest red blood cells in this gilded blood vessel.

 
 
 

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