So You Will.

The bar smelled just like the one on West 3rd street in the Village, the one where we would go and drink on Saturday afternoons before the crowds caught on, and we would stumble out in the early evening, kissing question marks into each other's drunken commutes home. It smelled just like it; I took deep, long breaths to make it mine. A game flashed by on the flat screen, I was not there anymore.

There are days I do not think of the City more than in passing, days when its image does not tear great big gashes across my chest. But they are few, and endlessly far between. It is self-indulgent, I know, the whining self-pity echoes through my empty apartment and the ether beyond, it does no one any good. My broken record scratches my senses. He writes that the job came through, the plans arranged themselves neatly, the move back across the pond has been scheduled for spring. The elation in my heart for their bright futures could only just keep my head over the surface; within ring storms of the deepest envy and sorrow for what I have not.

It turns out, after all the painted rainbows and imagined unicorns, that a life without New York to me is no life. That my words do not sing as pretty outside its borders, that my eyes do not sparkle as bright nor my heart beat as wild beyond its reach. That what I imagined was infantile storytelling of a home and a destiny was, in fact, to be sorted in the non-fiction aisle. That you spend your life trying to find that moment when it all makes sense and finally realize life IS in fact the futility of such a mission. And if there is a place you can rest your weary limbs at night, can rest your traveling heart through the seasons, you must.

So you will.