The Upside Down.

I left Manhattan on a Monday in March.  And I returned on a Monday in July.

Gone almost four months to the day.

It is a strange and surreal thing to step back into a place that you call home after many days - seasons, even - away. I felt something akin to a rush of adrenaline stepping back inside my apartment, at being reunited with my things. Everything was right where I left it, when I'd packed up mid-March, sure I'd be back by mid-April. Thanks to a generous landlady, even my plants had survived.  It felt almost like my past self had created a time capsule - a place frozen in the time of "before" - complete with winter parkas hanging on jacket hooks, my basket of scarves and gloves sitting at the ready, winter boots kicked off by the front door.  A giant pause button pushed on the Upper West Side.

What a lifetime this city, and the world at large lived in those four months.

As I kicked off my flip flops - next to those winter boots - and peeled off my jumpsuit, sticky from the day's travel, I found myself observing my world from an anthropologist's perspective...here, we observe a single woman, at age 40, in her personal nesting spot, on the island of Manhattan...

But really, it felt good to come home; to be back sitting on my own sofa, to run my fingers along the spines of my books, to recall just how many clothes I actually owned after living out of a suitcase for months and recycling the same five shirts on rotation.

My return has also felt a bit sad and lonely in a lot of ways too. The hustle and bustle of the city that never sleeps is gone, instead every day feels like a sleepy, quiet Sunday morning. I miss my roommate of my Mom, of having someone to greet every morning, of having another human around.  I am readjusting to four months of life in a house, with multiple rooms and a deck and a yard and SPACE to life in two small rooms, to city living in general. (Hey, news flash - this place is expensive!)  There are good days and bad days, highs and lows.  I am home now in some ways, though in other ways my heart isn't entirely sure where home is these days.

******

When I arrived back in Manhattan the other week, with far too many bags to handle on my own, I took a cab uptown to my apartment.  I felt like I was coming back to New York as my ghost self.  In a very surreal way it was like I had returned from some other distant land, amazed at all I was seeing as the city zipped past me from the cab windows, the cabbie asking me through his mask where I had been, how long I had been away, watching all the people - so many people! - walking about, all of them wearing masks in this new normal.

What was this strange island I had found myself on?

We turned the corner onto my block and I directed the driver to my building ("just past the scaffolding up ahead" - pandemic or not, some things in NY never change.) As I paid my fare and climbed out of that yellow cab, pulling luggage out of the trunk quickly to move out of the path of traffic, someone - I will never know who it was, or even where exactly they were shouting from - a car? an apartment building? - yelled out without missing a beat: "Welcome back! We missed you!"

That anonymous greeting felt like a welcome home from the city itself, a place that claims to be all business and hustle and New York tough but which deep down has a beating heart and a soul all its own. (Shh. Don't tell anybody.)