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Outside, the glowing ads of Times Square lit the streets like daylight, providing the Vegas-like illusion of a nightless reality, one in which the streets are always crowded and every corner attempts to lure you with high-pressure sales pitches for knock-off designer watches, sunglasses, or anything else a tourist might buy on impulse.

We had walked out of that bright loud chaos and into the darkness of an Irish pub; pop music playing over the sound system, flat panel TVs alit with football and basketball in high definition. Mekonnen held a beer in his hand and was telling me about Africa.

“We’ll spend a few days in the city and we’ll go to all the night clubs.” He was talking about Eritrea, the small nation on the continent’s northeastern corner bordering Ethiopa and Sudan. Mekonnen’s family was from there.

“They have night clubs?” I responded. “In Eritrea?”

“Yea. It’s crazy. Then we’ll go visit my grandparents out in the middle of the country – unpaved roads, huts, no electricity. They don’t speak English. No one over there does. It’s that type of thing.”

Mekonnen was in town visiting me for a few days. He and I had known each other since the first grade, just after Mekonnen and his family emigrated from Eritrea; a war had sent many of their countrymen fleeing. Mekonnen was born in Sudan en route to America, a journey that took Mekonnen’s parents and their three children nearly half a decade.

With their father working as a cab driver, and their mother running a vendor’s stand in downtown Washington, DC, Mekonnen and his two older brothers seemed a little out of place in our affluent suburb in northern Virginia. They dressed differently, a little because they were foreign, a little because they had less money than most of the other children.

They seemed not only to face the typical obstacles of an immigrant family, but also the obstacles of a black family. They faced racism, cultural identity struggles, longer odds against their successes. Statistics show that one in four black males serve time in prison at least once in their lives, usually in their late teens or early twenties. Mekonnen’s family was no different. When we were thirteen, Mekonnen’s oldest brother began a multi-year sentence for assault with a deadly weapon.

The family held together though and five years later, when Mekonnen and I graduated from high school, he became the first person in his family to go to college. Several years later, his oldest brother, having served his time and worked a few years managing a wholesale warehouse, followed in his footsteps and enrolled at a university.

I watched my friend drinking his beer, still telling me about Africa and what we will do there.

“July,” he was saying. “Two weeks, maybe three. We’ll buy the plane tickets right after new years.”

Mekonnen was an inspiration to me and I’d always seen him as the hero in some inspiring tale, a Horatio Alger character with a modern realistic twist. I recognize the story of his life this way and imagine the ways I might narrate it if putting it down in print. To Mekonnen though, he was no one special. His life, as ours is to each of us, isn’t a story but a reality.

I’ve been learning to find stories in people’s lives, the ones they might not even be aware they are living. That’s what I’ve been doing in New York. I’ve been learning that skill by talking to people, by going to plays and performances, by reading, by sharpening my awareness so I can recognize the scene changes, acts, and climaxes of a life still in progress.

The city is treating me well for it. Through my pursuits I’ve also been meeting the people who are helping me build my career as a novelist and a storyteller, the people who are helping me learn the business side of the art form, the people who are teaching me how to run my own shows, how to become a major player in the game.

I’m making actor friends, businessman friends, comedian friends, manager friends, critic friends, production friends, musician friends, agent friends, director friends, producer friends, publisher and editor friends… people who see how serious I am about my work, how committed I am to creating meaningful and compelling stories in both the written and oral forms. Everyone is so casual, I’m not even sure if many of them know that they’re helping me so greatly.

I’ve been in New York for almost a year though and I’m getting a little sick of staying one spot for so long. Other than a few weeks in Alaska, Texas, and Virginia, I’ve barely left the concrete jungle of the city. Tentatively, I’m planning maybe a few weeks’ stay on a beach in the Dominican, or maybe just renting a room for a month on Venice Beach. Those trips are still hypotheticals though. They’re not tacked to any great adventure, not circled in red on any of my calendars. Furthermore, the uncertainty of when I’ll be promoting my first novel and when I’ll be doing my next storytelling show seems to occupy a still unknown piece of my near future, keeping me hesitant to plan much more.

Mekonnen set down his beer. “So it’s a lock right. You’re coming with me to see my family in Eritrea this July?”

“I’m in,” I said, raising my mug for a toast, knowing full well, despite life’s unpredictability, that in a matter of months, the two of us will be on African soil.