I watched a movie and the song stayed the same. I go to Central Park the way I return to an essay already finished, certain there is nothing left to say, and yet compelled to read it again. Once, this place was a place mark in happiness: a pause where laughter caught its breath, an occasion between dates that promised more clauses, more time. We entered through familiar gates with the confidence of people who believe the future is generous. The paths curved kindly then, as if designed to accommodate the rhythm of two bodies learning how to walk side by side. Every bench felt chosen. Every clearing felt like a broadcast meant just for us.

I remember the park as a map of beginnings. The first date that multiplied into many dates, the soft astonishment of realizing that memory could begin forming in real time. Family visits anchored themselves here too, the park serving as proof that my life had coordinates worth traveling to. This is where I go, I would say, gesturing toward trees and water, translating myself into geography. Back then, Central Park was affirmation. It mirrored back a version of me that felt coherent, lucky, underway.

Now I walk it alone, sometimes willingly, sometimes with a resistance that sits heavy in my chest. The solitude is not the problem; it’s the contrast. The abruptness of the shift. One day the park is a shared language, and the next it is a dialect I must speak by myself. I follow the same routes each morning, the same looping logic of paths that promise variation but always return me to myself. Meandering is different when it’s chosen than when it’s habitual. What once felt like freedom now resembles inertia.

The charm has not left the park, I know that intellectually. The trees still perform their seasons with discipline and grace. The lake still catches light as if it were practicing devotion. Runners pass me with faces arranged into determination, couples lean into each other as if gravity has singled them out. All of it is objectively beautiful. And yet, it reaches me the way a postcard reaches someone who no longer recognizes the address. I see it, I register it, but I remain untouched.

Gratitude used to arrive uninvited. It would settle into me while I walked, a quiet certainty that this was enough—this morning, this person beside me, this city opening its arms. Happiness made everything luminous. The ordinary became charged. A squirrel darting across the path felt like a sign. A street musician at the edge of the park felt like accompaniment. Now, without that headspace, everything flattens. The park does not offend me; it simply doesn’t notice me anymore. Indifference, I’ve discovered, can be more devastating than loss, and life’s greatest war can be against the self I can’t live without.

There is a particular loneliness in walking somewhere that remembers you differently. Part of the fear of identifying an anxiety is that the words used may also trigger the keen worry. My feet know where to go without asking me. My body repeats the ritual, hoping repetition might summon feeling the way rubbing a worry stone summons calm. But routine is unforgiving when it is emptied of meaning. Each turn reminds me that I am circling, not arriving. That I am passing landmarks that once signified joy and now only measure distance.

Everyone carries the same quiet, unvoiced conviction that somewhere deep inside, they are unlike anyone else. I keep walking, perhaps because part of me believes that places, like people, can surprise you if you stay long enough. Or because I am not ready to surrender the idea that happiness once lived here and might, in some altered form, return. Central Park holds my past gently, even when I cannot. Alone, unresolved, attentive in spite of myself, I move through it trusting that indifference is not the final state, only a season I must cross.

Our attachments function like sanctuaries, like objects of devotion, places where we direct our faith and attention. What we bind ourselves to matters deeply. Attachments are never trivial. So choose them carefully; choose, with great care, what you allow yourself to revere with such intensity.