If I Could Come Home

I rode the train with the suits, as usual, but then I switched to an uptown local to a stop I barely recognized, amazed how every train carries a different population. Here in this undiscovered part of town, lay an apartment that maybe, maybe would be the first New York home of my dear friend and fellow immigrant. I had promised to look at it, even though who was I to judge whether such a place could be hers.

We have lists of requirements, or requests, or even wild fantasies of our dream home. We walk through endless apartments, we open cupboards and imagine ourselves sitting in the window sill. We hmmm and we oooh, all the while jotting down pros and cons and checking off the dreams, or not.

Is there something better out there? Could this be good enough? If I pass this up, will anything at all be waiting around the bend? You walk back down the four flights of stairs and try to know if this was the place, and how much you are willing to fight for it. You hear a creak in the step and wonder if that is the dealbreaker.

But then, there they are, the moments when you walk into an apartment and your heart smiles, when you see your list and toss it out the window, when there is no flaw you are not ready to love entirely. The feeling in your very core that says that whatever may come up, you will accept it and make it work, because this is your home, and this is where you belong.

How much finding that apartment is like falling in love. How much love, is like coming home.