My name is Roger Collin. I've worked for the New York Times for just over 30 years and was a foreign correspondent for much of that time, foreign editor, and now I'm a columnist, which means I write opinion pieces for the paper.

People might think I don't sound like a New Yorker, but I feel in spirit and in the intensity of my feelings for the city and my identification with it very much in New Yorker, yes.

So I've been living with this ghostly New York and I would lie awake sometimes at night and hear distant sirens and occasionally a chopper overhead and bird song in the morning and again the sirens.

Now asking myself when will New York come back? It's city of energy, energy defines New York and how will that energy reconstitute itself?

What about the tourists? What about the restaurants, the bars, the museums, Broadway, businesses, everything.

So I was just going for long walks at the end of the day and I'd been on this long walk out to the Brooklyn Naval Yards and beyond and as I was coming back I was dusk and there was no be around and there were these pieces of plastic and cans, skittering across Front Street.

And I saw a rat, no it's not a rare sight in New York, but the rat was just kind of ambling around and because there was nobody else around this just set off a kind of apocalyptic vision of the city taken over by vermin and

it was a day or two after that that I woke up with this line in my head and I started writing.

I forgive you New York, I forgive you your snile, your aggression, your hustle and hassle.

I forgive you La Guadilla and your summer stench of uncollected garbage. I forgive you no cabs in the rain.

I forgive you the crusty deceptive puddles of slush at curbside. I even forgive you the mats and no place to park and delivery trucks in the bike lane.

All is forgiven if you will only return. The subways are lilyquies of the homeless, the trains that never come, the trains that stop in the middle of the tunnel, the traffic, the garbage trucks blocking cross streets, the jackhammering of construction, the hiss of smoke from a manhole cover, the idling stretch limo SUVs,

the drone of a millionaire conditioning units, the drivers leaning on horns, the city hum that never ceases until it did.

I forgive you now and forever. How could I ever begrudge you your restlessness, your relentlessness, your lip, your affrontery, your appraising glance, your pushiness, your impatience,

your disregard for social niceties, when I knew all along that your great secret was at an extreme degree of ambition, co-exist in your streets with the empathy every New Yorker feels for a fellow New Yorker.

Only come back and all is pardoned. The tourist meandering in the theatre district, your roads pitted with potholes, your crazy prices, your dinner parties ending at 9.30, because tomorrow is another New York day and there's money to be made, your awful basketball, your restaurants that have a table, maybe in a couple of months, your overcrowded sidewalks, your iPhone addicts gather at the end of the day.

Your way of never ever relenting until you turn every one of your workers into a zombie by nightfall.

I forgive you the rats, yes even the rats, and I'll throw in the roaches.

The swerter of August, forgiven, the icy winter winds of the Hudson and the East River, forgiven, the impossibility of getting across town, forgiven.

I forgive you the crowds, the craziness, the cruelty, the cursing, the complaining customers, the impatient merchants, and the most uncomfortable cabs in the world.

I forgive you your kale salads, your restaurants that sell only oatmeal, your trends. I forgive you your street preachers, your sanctimonious parents, who drone on about their children's schools.

I forgive you Macy's during the Christmas season, and Times Square, always.

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