maybe not the big red apple, more like the red spicy pepper of my life

Everyone has an opinion about New York. The French love it. Midwesterners think it’s stuck up and full of itself but fun to visit anyway. Asians flock to it. No one can quite ignore it.

For me, New York is like a recurring dream. It keeps coming back to haunt me as a place that changes my life. Again and again. Sometimes in good ways, and sometimes not so much.

I moved there when I was seven, stayed six years, returned when I was a young adult, stayed three years and then left for good. I returned for visits thereafter, but they were short visits. Inconsequential, really. Until just a handful of years ago, when I returned to visit my now ex, who was spending the year there. One of my last trips to Manhattan ever was to see him. It was, sadly, the last time that we still felt married.


So tomorrow I’m heading to New York. Ed has legal matters to attend to, and I seized the chance to travel there with him. I want to experience a neutral New York. One that doesn’t rock my life any. Ed hates the city with a passion (like a true New Yorker that he is, he’s incapable of feeling merely indifferent about the place) and so I’m thinking we’ll have a fine old time. I’m not looking to eat well, to shop, to see the sights. The trip is a return of two aging former New Yorkers who see it as a place where they grew up, for better or worse.

That’s tomorrow. Today, I worked. In downtimes, I played around with the stitches in my mouth. Discreetly. And watched students kiss the soil out on Bacom Hill. Or something.