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Here you can see three pictures that I took in three different boroughs yesterday: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens.

Still, there are many things that moved me that I didn’t take pictures of. Every time the ferry at the Astoria landing turns to make its way south toward Roosevelt Island, the panoramic sweep of the city skyline, coupled with the rocking of the boat, always unsteadies me. I reach for my phone, realizing in that same second that there’s no way this vista can be captured by anything other than my own two eyes.

Also observed yet undocumented: The wild sunflower and lonely sailboat framing the Hell Gate bridge in the semidarkness of early evening; the only September firefly I have ever seen; the peace and vivaciousness of sitting right at the open windowed wall of a taqueria, sipping hibiscus tea, looking out into my neighborhood so new and strange and familiar, feeling trancelike as one salsa song flows right to the next without interruption of the tempo or key; my exhilaration in the discovery of using bike routes to stitch my way into a new familiarity with a city comprising neighborhoods previously known to me in fragments.

I did get a picture of me, happy to have survived biking across a new-to-me bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, connecting the LES to Brooklyn—as you can see above. I sent it to my mom and she told me, “you look so happy here.” Moments before (or after?) I took this, as I was processing the strenuousness of the ride and elation for having traversed yet another new bike route, a monarch butterfly fluttered across the sidewalk, up toward the bridge, as if about to make its own pilgrimage across the East River.

I hold the things I saw this mid-September weekend—but did not capture—in my mind, and then I let them go.