There Was a Love Affair

New York summer arrives. You make peace with the air like treacle in your lungs, accept the steady trickle of sweat down the small of your back. Spend five minutes in air conditioning and forget what is out there, it smacks you in the face every time. The F train is running with delays, a voice says, and you try to slow the warm pulse in your veins. 

Next Thursday seems like a black hole, he says, like the shadow of a spot so dense no light escapes. You know the feeling so well. Half the boxes packed, the impossibility of seeing what lies behind that magic date and everything will work out because it's too late to go back now. You should have taken that G when it came, transferred at Hoyt Schermerhorn. You don't understand how others look so unaffected. Black jeans and boots. You are a puddle along the platform. 

It's different this time, you know. I still talk of end dates and movings and not even this can last forever, but it doesn't feel the same. New York City has rooted itself in my backbone, has nestled itself into the spaces that were not mad with youth and fervor, not deranged with childhood trauma in search of a fix. It has crept into the parts of me that make a life, that build a home when it thinks no one is watching. I look at every building, every street corner, every hurried face, and I know. 

I am exactly where I ought to be.