May It Last.

My mind plays tricks on me.

I'm heading to the airport, leaving Atlanta to head back north after a deliciously long holiday break. Conceptually, I know that I hold in my hand a ticket that will fly me back to LaGuardia, I am aware that New York City is my destination on this Sunday afternoon in early January. And yet, simultaneously, my brain also thinks otherwise.  There is a part of me, buried deep in my muscle memory, that is sure I'm flying further north, back to Boston; that I will land at Logan and return to the home I knew for ten years, the city for many more than that; that it will be those Cambridge apartment doors I walk through with my suitcases and bags instead of the doors I do ultimately walk through on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.

Naturally, all of this makes me a bit sad, a touch melancholy.  Moving can make one feel unmoored and I miss my home and life in Boston for all the reasons that I knew I would, I'm sad about all of the things exactly as I predicted.  I saw that writing on the wall, I anticipated this particular heartache even as I plunged headlong into my New York move. Truthfully every bit of homesickness I have experienced since September has felt exactly as I thought it would, has been triggered by moments almost to the T as I'd expected.  I suppose that is a sign I know myself well.  I suppose it is also a sign that Boston lives in my blood, my heart.  As it should.

Still, I land in New York as planned.  I collect my luggage, I queue up in the yellow cab line and the cabbie and I make our way from Queens into Manhattan, back to the streets of Upper West Side that make up my new neighborhood. The entry door, the apartment, all of it is so different from the life I have lived for so many years but still so much of it somehow feels the same.  After I drop my bags and take quick note of how terribly dead and brown my sweet little Christmas tree is, I step back outside into the crisp early evening air to walk a handful of blocks and meet a few friends for dinner, graduate school friends who happen to have planned a reunion dinner near my apartment, knowing I would try and join them once my flight landed.

This little gesture, that they would come to me and my new neighborhood so I could join them, strikes me as a particular fortunate moment in my life.

I soak it in.  I breathe deep as I walk to meet this group. I am grateful for the cold New York air.  I am reminded once again that the Northeast - up and down that beautiful Eastern seaboard from New Jersey to New England will always feel like home to me. Boston lives and breathes within me still and I'm so glad for that (I don't want it to ever leave) yet I am reminded once again that this is now - my new adventure, my New York moment.  The city lights, the pavement, the sounds, the (many) Christmas trees now piled on the sidewalk for garbage day, the (few) Christmas trees still lit up in apartment windows.  It is all so beautiful in its mundaneness.


******

I said goodbye to 2018 and bonjour to 2019 in Paris.  My friends and I stood in front of Notre Dame cathedral as the clock turned to midnight and the bells began to chime.  To stand in a square, in front of a church that has been there for hundreds and hundreds of year felt magical and dreamy and as I listened to the bells chime and watched the Eiffel Tower in the distance I wished for a year that is worthy of this sort of welcome; for days of joy and love and light and kindness with a nod to our past and a focus on our future.

On the very first day of this new year, I stood in line at the Museum D'Orsay, waiting with other patrons to enter the museum.  The woman in line behind me made a comment that the things that you see on the first day of a year are the things you will see all year.  We agreed that feasting our eyes on beautiful artwork in one of the world's most phenomenal museums would do the trick.  May it be so, 2019. May it be.

******

A friend texted me earlier in the week asking me about my New Year's resolutions.  I wrote her back saying I was still thinking about them, deciding what I wanted for the year ahead.  Then, another minute later, I promptly bombarded her with four more text messages with both tangible and lofty, somewhat difficult to measure, goals for the year.  Guess I'd been thinking about them more than I'd actually realized.

Yesterday I messaged two friends about a vacation we're cooking up for later this year. The initial dates we discussed weren't working on my end, I was too crazed to squeeze in what we planned for when we did and was feeling the pinch even before we had bought our airline tickets.  Despite knowing that the two people on the other end of the email were my friends I was nervous about telling them all of this.  Nervous of course because my admission was making myself vulnerable, exposing the truth, and what if they decided to go on without me?  But, alas.  I am lucky.  They understood, they agreed to the extended timeline, they were so kind, so thoughtful, so gracious.  It was one moment of compassion among friends; it meant an awful lot to me.

So I continue.  We all continue.  To do our best to keep our heart open, to make ourselves vulnerable when we need to, to be brave, to keep the faith.  And that's where I am, nine days into this January, this New Year of 2019.