I suppose that is the thing about New York. It is always a little more than you had hoped for.
You spend all day minding the chickens, chatting with them about the goings-on in the vegetable patches, digging up worms and hand feeding them wriggly little treats as though they wouldn't do just fine without you. You roll the garbage bin to the curb, water the plants, charge the car, clean the coop, check in on the timers, monitor the construction sites across the field. You live a perfectly ordinary domestic life in a town that used to be the country and now has expanded beyond its seams, in a house ten times too big for you, and you do not recognize yourself.
You spend an idle hour grazing across housing listings – Victorian frames in upstate New York, 400-year-old farms in your home county, cramped studios in the East Village, only-slightly-less cramped one-bedrooms in downtown Stockholm. If all the world lay before you, where would you go, barefoot and free?
It was never the middle of the road that appealed to you, never the safe comfort of direction. It was always flowers in the wayside, always flying off the hills. Always Manhattan apartments or farms in the wilderness.
It's just, at some point you may have to choose one way or another. At some point being pulled in two directions means getting stuck in the middle after all, your heart slowly tearing at the seams.
Only you know if you're flying
or floating away.
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