Editor’s Note: This is an unedited, submitted piece, originally posted on Facebook. If you want to contribute your own writing about your experiences in the city, please email the piece or a link if it’s already published to nicole.he@nyulocal.com. 

November fourth, year two-thousand eight. On top of a momentously huge rooftop on second avenue looking at the heart of the east village, the heart of democracy in New York City which is in the heart of democracy in New York, and maybe even the heart of what seems now, in this perfect moment, what may just be rising to become again the heart of democracy in perhaps this whole beautiful world. Barack Hussein Obama has won the hearts and votes of America, and he is our new president.

We all run to the rooftop of this apartment in the east village screaming until our lungs could no longer sustain breath, as we looked down on the tiny people below, jumping up and down mere millimeters in our vision but booming with screams of “OBAMA!” and “YES WE CAN!” and unintelligible gusts of happiness being forced through their throats, irrepressible. Things are going to be very different now.

The taxis are deafening, their high-pitched, microtonal peals of air cutting through the night like their hearts were trying to cut the bad of the eight years out of the smog of New York City with their intensity.

People are on top of their frozen taxicabs, cabbies bellowing with joy, people crying and holding one another and screaming: the world is aglow with irrepressible joy and optimism. I must be outside right now, because I was just involved in this throbbing community of people in changing the world. In changing my world.

Outside on my bike, I scream at people as if a madman, my yells being resonated by the voices of entire mobs - they may be friends, coworkers, families or strangers - but their joy was communal, accented by taxi cab peals and screaming Harleys and rambling, wildly happy drunks with their viciously confused Gospel, the mobs of teens in their tight, short clothing reeking of booze and laughter, hugging one another while jumping up in the air from the ground as if their world was electric.

Biking through the city, west towards the prime meridian of this floating city of glee, and then down Broadway, where the lights are always bright, into Chinatown - my whooping, peace-signal-throwing demeanor started to get far less widespread reception; the McCainers were as easy to spot as if they had bathed in red, slooping and dragging themselves home, wondering whether or not they had even put their hearts on the right goal, perhaps, or maybe even wondering - was the world going to be a better place anyways, perhaps?

This is a timeless moment. By the financial district, I could still see the Obamas far more heavily than the McCainers, covering the streets with their screaming and drunken, high-off-life-and-a-victory-shot-or-eight exuberance. I got back to my dorm on the South Street Seaport to explosions of students in absolute joy. We had been a part of something, and more of us were than ever before in history. We had been a part, for maybe the first time for some of us, of declaring who we are, what we want this world to be. And this is the moment that has validated our display of self with a mirror in return, and the first mirror that has been around that I’ve ever seen. We are part of something now. We made this country ours again - not our parents, not our grandparents, not characters from history we’ve forgotten about since eighth grade, but us, me, you, us on the street at this very moment.

And on the streets, “We are the champions, my friends…and we kept on fighting ‘til the end…” U2, Queen, The Beatles, all blasting out of cars and mouths and speakers, a huge symphony of all of New York (the amount of disappointed people barely even muffled the sound.)

And I think back to my life, fingers with peace signs in the air and the world screaming as if World War Two had just ended, as if the french massacre had ended, or perhaps a period of time when we were not a country as one. And now we, with a lot of work and a lot of pain, can do that, can become a unified country like I always imagine it used to be.

And so I chant to the street, leaning up against my huge dorm, windows open with puckered mouths yelling Christmas and Love and Glory out to the world, “Change! Change! Change! Hope!” And maybe, just maybe, with hope, I’m not wrong. They are not just buzz words in a campaign, not in our hearts right now. And now for something completely different.

Change. Hope.