Wednesday, September 4, 2019// The Statement
6B
I 

fall in love three times a day. Perhaps 
it’s because I’m a cancer sun and a 
cancer moon; perhaps it’s because I’m 
a writer. Perhaps it’s because I exclusively 
seek out experiences that make my heart 
race (in a good way). But with everything 
I’ve fallen blindly head over heels for in 21 
years –– boys in glasses, coffee shops that 
sell newspapers, banana muffins, redheaded 
best friends, novels dripping in rich prose 
(set in Paris), I’ve never quite made the list 
of the places, ideas and people my heart 
aches for. Perhaps, this is because I am a 
member of a generation that monitors self-
worth based on our social media accounts. 
Or perhaps it is because I put pressure on 
myself that steals my ability to triumph in 
who I am. 
Ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted to 
move to New York City. New York’s biggest 
delight for me lies in its impassioned vigor 
for live theatre. Working on Broadway in 
the city of my eight-year-old daydreams this 
summer didn’t live up to the expectations 
I always held tight in the back of my mind. 
Simultaneously, the experience of living 
in the middle of all I’ve hoped for pushed 
me to fall in love yet again, not with the 
city, but myself. I recognized the reality of 
New York beneath the sparkle. It’s a place 
not of idealism and magic but nitty, gritty 
life — real life. Being out of the bubble of 
my childhood pushed me to look at what 
New York truly is: a bubbly, wide awake, 
disgusting paradise. The things that make 
New York ugly make New York real, and 
the things that make New York real make 
it beautiful. After 21 years of self-doubt over 
insignificant flaws — pinching extra skin on 
my sides, scrutinizing every word I put on a 
page, agonizing over relationships — I can 
exhale a bit. I am young, I am in the middle 
of it all and the very things that make me real 
are the things that make me beautiful.
BY ELI RALLO, 
SMTD SENIOR

A

fter saying goodbye to my family 
and schlepping my two heavy 
suitcases onto the New York-
bound train, the first thing I did was pull 
up Instagram on my phone. On my story, 
I posted a picture of the train I had just 
boarded with the caption “NYC bound for 
the summer! If you’re in the city and wanna 
be my friend and go on adventures hmu!”. 
Two hours passed and only three people 
responded: my girlfriend, 500 miles away 
and another friend, 2,700 miles away, both 
to wish me luck.
The first day of my internship a few 
days later I hoped to make friends with 
some of the other interns, and I succeeded 
with one or two out of 40. I reached out 
to several people who I knew would be 
in the city and built up a decent network, 
but there were still many days I didn’t 
have anyone to hang out with and still had 
things I wanted to do. So, I decided to do 
them by myself. My summer love story is 
to solitude and these photos dive deep into 
the city that I loved to explore by myself.

BY DANYEL 
THARAKAN, 
ENGINEERING 
SENIOR

A statement 
from the 
photographer: