16

Sixteen years. An impossibly long love. A teenager, learning to drive but unwilling to ever go anywhere but here. We sit at the bar and catch up on the years. Have we really only known each other for four years? he says, his scruffy beard gray now like it wasn’t when we met. My heart mended now like it wasn’t then,  when it was tender and bleeding despite itself. When I tell him I am happy, I mean it, and it seems more like a gift to myself than anything else. 

Sixteen years I have lived here, but hasn’t New York been my home for much longer? Didn’t I dream of belonging here when I didn’t belong anywhere else? When I arrived here, late one Thursday night, and the bright lights of Times Square screamed at us in the airport shuttle, wasn’t it like seeing someone you truly loved after too much time apart? 

When I arrived here, wasn’t it like coming home?