I am sometimes caught off guard by the things that I miss. They are so specific. The blue of the walls in my bedroom. A particular burger on West 10th Street. The two minutes just before yoga began when Alisha and I would whisper as quickly as possible about everything that had happened in the week before. The stretch of street between Manhattan and Fredrick Douglass that I’d cross with equal parts fear and hope before a first date.
I’m mostly surprised by how much I don’t miss. And how so much of what I do miss feels irrevocably lost. As though it’s been packed up and put away. And were I to visit, it would remain behind closed doors. I will never again be as young as I once was. I will never again smoke a cigar with a boy in Central Park. Laura and I will never again spend a week in May eating pizza and drinking wine and buying earrings on our way to dinner. That’s all done, now. And life here is so good and so right, but I just sometimes find myself wishing that I go back and visit. Not New York, really, but life as it was.
