This book began as an act of liberation—an act of rebellion against the force that pulled me toward you, only for New York to tear us apart. I blamed the distance for our rupture. It was easier. It demanded less explanation when recounting it to others. It didn’t plant seeds of doubt in their minds—or mine—about how or why it didn’t work. When I want to feel a flicker of joy towards us, I tell myself that, too. It works.
But in the deep exploration of why we ended, why the story unraveled the way it did, one answer always rises to the surface: my truth, the city’s truth, and yours.
My truth took shape in words, bleeding out as poems—cursive, unreadable ink splashed on every surface that could bear its weight. At first, it was unbearable. Harsh, raw, abrupt. Painful, yet creatively consuming. So I kept writing. If you only lived in my mind, then our memories and feelings didn’t have to. I was still tied to you by them. So I wrote, and wrote. It sounds cliché to say it filled my days and nights, but it’s true. From February to March, and so on.
Watching the evolution of my emotions, tangled in the translation of language, I can’t help but retrace the moment when the first sentence of His Name is New York was typed. It was born in a windowless shed—the way I remember your first place in the city. You were asleep, or at least that’s how my fragmented memory pictures it. I was awake. Restless. Peace was an absent friend. I sat there, letting a monstrous anxiety consume me, gnawing at every gentle memory I tried to grasp. Slowly, I suffocated the room with a loud, heavy silence. I escaped the room, escaped you, us. But the emptiness followed. It became a cage—one that no one else seemed to notice.
And so, as His Name is New York took shape, he began to write his own story, intertwining my feelings with reflections on love—a marriage between my heart’s voice and my mind’s course. The walls around me began to crumble, and light crept through the cracks. I believe the book urged me to pull away from the room where I’d left you—and the room in my mind. He was a call to freedom—creative freedom, personal freedom. I left behind hauntings that were never yours to carry, sealed in that windowless shed. A small price to pay for finding myself along the way.
One of the many reasons why His Name is New York will always be dear to me and why I dedicate this letter to him.
MARIANA L. PAZ 