Now, Forever, Always.

In the fall of 2006, the last fall that I lived in New York, I vividly remember walking down to Starbucks one morning, after I'd logged into my work computer and crossed off the first essential tasks of the day.  The air was cool but not yet cold, and I found myself standing at the counter daydreaming while I filled my coffee with cream.  A woman spoke to me, startling me out of my daze.  She complimented my shoes, rattling on about how she couldn't believe I'd found them; that specific designer was so hard to come across.  I politely smiled and thanked her sincerely for the compliments - all the while knowing I had bought the shoes at DSW a week before.  They were certainly not that hard to come by and absolutely not the expensive designer option that she thought they were.  After she and I said our goodbyes and I walked up the block to my office, I smiled to myself.  I could do this New York life, I thought.  Perhaps I could make it here after all.

Of course, life unfolds as it is meant to and I was meant to go back to Boston at the end of 2006. I was meant to build a majority of my adult life there, to relish almost all of my 20s and 30s in that charming beautiful city where some of the very best people I know live, some of my most cherished memories were made, and twelve years unfolded after the first time I left New York that I would not trade for anything in the world.

That was how it was meant to be then.

And this is how it is meant to be now.

Exactly one week ago I moved to Manhattan.

I came back to New York.

But this time, I did it the way I have *always* wanted to do it - from the time I was a twelve year old girl, my personal dreams slowly unfolding, pining for a life that I wanted to be mine.  This time, I am in New York, New York on the Upper West Side in a brownstone that felt like it could be mine the moment I walked in to it this summer.

The decision to leave Boston was not an easy one by any stretch and I hemmed and hawed for virtually an entire year before finally deciding to uproot the life I've known for some eighteen years and take the leap, shake things up, stretch my wings, etc, etc.  There were, as it happens, nearly 8 million signs pointing me to New York, telling me it was time to return.  They popped up in the most obvious of ways and in the most benign; and while deep down in my heart of hearts I imagine I always knew I would go, I also came very close to not.  It was only after looking at many apartments in Manhattan and then, also looking at ones in Boston, that I heard a still small voice in the back of my mind, asking, as I walked out of a perfectly lovely and charming Boston brownstone rental, what about New York? If you don't go now, will you ever go?

And so.  It was suddenly clear.

I went.

I have gone.

It is something to leave a place when you're happy and content.  That makes it all the harder.  If you're not unhappy in one place, when do you leave for another place?

And yet.

There is also this - that still small voice that stirs within you to go, the itch that has always been there, even during the brightest and best times in Boston (and oh, there were and will be so many bright and beautiful times in Boston and New England, for you have a piece of my heart always) but the call, no matter how quiet, continues and would have remained I think, for all of my days if I had not given New York another shot.

As that pop singer I adore, Taylor Swift, says - Welcome to New York.  It's been waiting for you.

I miss Boston, of course I do.  I knew that I would.  I wake some mornings aching for my old treehouse, the comfort of my friends, routine, and familiarity. I knew that would happen too. But I also feel, and this is hard for me to articulate, such a sense of calm assurance that I'm in the right spot right now that it brings me immediate comfort when I start to miss the world I have known for the last many years.  Last week, when I left my office, which happens to be across the Hudson in New Jersey, and walked to the train to take me back to the city, I had this feeling of coming home.  It feels good to be working back in my home state and when I walk down my block toward Central Park or the subway or to run an errand in my brand new block I feel like I've come home.   Maybe not forever, maybe not always.  But right now there is a feeling of contentment in my heart - for going, for leaping - and that, to me, is one of the most important and luckiest feelings I know.

It is not lost on me that today also marks the 17th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks; that I am moving into and starting a new chapter in New York City when so many innocent people are gone, never would and never will get that next chapter. My how fast 17 years have gone by, my how that day feels like it happened just yesterday.  I marvel that there is a generation that doesn't know life with those two towers standing, that never knew a world when 9/11 was just another date on the calendar.  I suppose that's how the survivors of Pearl Harbor felt; I imagine that is how my parents feel as I ask them about newsworthy milestones that occurred in their lifetime - JFK's assassination, Armstrong's landing on the moon - and how they marvel over what a cultural touchstone it was as they try to explain it to someone who was not alive when it occurred.  With each year that passes I keep wondering the best way to honor those thousands of people who were killed just by doing the same thing most of us do every weekday - going to work. And I don't have the right answer, I do not pretend that I ever will.  But I think of them, I hold them and their families in my heart.  I notice names on memorials, I am aware of birthdates depicting that they were nearly the same age as me when the towers fell, or that they were the same age as I am now, and oh, what crummy luck that they were there then, it is more than we can bear.

I walk around this brave and beautiful city that has grown and evolved for centuries, where towers rise and fall and rise again, this city that I have been enamoured with since I was a little girl and I offer up a prayer of thanks, of the deepest gratitude. For getting the chance - on my timeline, on my terms, for me.  My new home, my next chapter.