The coffee from the French press tastes like cigarettes. Coffee does that sometimes. I remember nights smoking in the kitchen window in Gothenburg, that yellow kitchen I swore I'd whitewash but which I instead leaned into and everything looked like the 70s. That kitchen in the wooden apartment building near the sea, just down the hill from where my parents met and fell in love and lived together, it was the first time I felt I had something that tied me to my history. They were here, now I was here.
I moved into that apartment after my first stint in New York, signed a lease sight unseen, a friend going in my stead and confirming it wasn't a disaster. The truth is it was wonderful. But just like you cannot make yourself love someone who looks good on paper, I couldn't love the apartment when my heart was already so firmly planted elsewhere. I unpacked every last item in that apartment resentfully, feeling the weight of each damn plate chain me to a place I could only think of in terms of what it was not. It was not loud streets; it was not untapped potential; it was not where I finally felt like I made sense for the first time in my life.
It was not New York.
I had many happy years in that apartment, many happy times in that town, it gave me so many things I hadn't known to ask for in the scattered ruins that was my person before I moved in. But on the day that I sent in my notice, the day I declared I would move out because the time had come for me to go home, to return to my planet in the strange grids of Manhattan, was still one of the happiest days of my life.
New York, I've given up a lot to be with you, have dragged myself through your muck when there were greener pastures to be had. But your coffee tastes better, my scattered ruins stretch and nestle more comfortably in your arms, on your worst days (and we've seen a few of those lately, haven't we?) you are still my greatest dreams come true. It's only hard on paper.
Loving you is the easiest thing I've done.
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