I Still Love You New York

Sometimes, as a writer, we write something, and never publish it. There are a myriad of reasons why we don’t, some good, some lame. This one is more or less lame, as I think I didn’t publish it simply because I’m lazy.

It looks complete. Maybe I wasn’t satisfied with it, I don’t know. Maybe I really was lazy. Maybe it didn’t seem like the right time, but considering I began writing this in January, picked it back up in May, and then picked it back up AGAIN today (interestingly, four months apart each time), I wonder if there ever was going to be a right time.

Then again, I can probably stop wondering any of that, since I’m publishing it right now. I suppose NOW, is the right time, today, 09/12/2011, the 10 year anniversary of my first day in a brand new world, of everyone’s first day in a brand new world, and a day that changed…well…everything.

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I originally wrote the first version of this column in late January. Somehow, I never went back to it, but the recent killing of Osama Bin Laden was bittersweet for me. It’s hard to celebrate anyone’s violent death, but he was the man behind one of my life’s defining moments, and certainly one of the most defining of my dozen years spent living in New York City.

In a few weeks, I will “celebrate”" my18-month anniversary of being back in Fort Worth.

I’m not sure what to make of this anniversary. On one hand, i am enjoying my lifestyle in Texas. It is active; it is vibrant; it is full of life, love, and the pursuit of happiness (and beer). On the other hand, I *really* miss NYC. I mean, I really miss it.

I miss the pace, I miss the diversity, I miss hunkering down in my basement apartment, completely oblivious to the world around me. I miss having lots of late night (well after midnight) restaurant options, every night of the week.

I miss the subway and not having to worry about driving places, I miss wandering Times Square on a HOT summer night at 2:30 in the morning and the place being completely alive despite the time and temperature. I miss that living on edge moment because you never knew when an argument between two people on the street might break out into a fight.

I miss that buzz.

But i don’t miss the cost of living. I don’t miss NOT being able to come down from that high that is NYC. (I often equated living in NYC with being high or buzzed 24/7. That’s nice in theory, but in reality, you always do want to come down eventually, and NYC really doesn’t allow that.)

I don’t miss being constantly poor, and simply not being able to go out 9 nights out of ten. I don’t miss having a limited circle of friends, and I don’t miss the fact that none of us could do much of anything together because we didn’t have money.

But there is just so much I do miss, and so many things I don’t think will ever translate to Fort Worth. For being such a large city, and despite having really progressed in recent years, it’s still caught up in backwoods, small town politics, and well, pettiness. “The Fort Worth Way”, as it’s been called.

Anyway, I didn’t come here to bury Fort Worth; but rather to praise NYC. It’s an amazing place, filled with so much life that if you’ve never been there, you can’t even imagine it.

It is alive and it is vibrant. And it is always on. Fort Worth certainly has its moments where it rivals that vibrancy, but it seems to be limited to the weekends, and the odd week day – which, is not necessarily a bad thing. That spontaneity definitely allows for some excitement – you never know when a Monday happy hour with a friend may turn into a full-blown evening of revelry concluding with beers on your patio on a warm summer night.

I like Fort Worth. I love New York. Granted, I had a dozen years in NYC as an adult to build that love, and less than two years in Fort Worth. I believe there’s a reasonable chance I will have time to grow to love Fort Worth, but for now, my heart still belongs to NYC, and I suspect as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that love will grow.

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Epilogue: That love d0es continue to grow. Yesterday, 9/11/2011, I thought of New York a lot, and in a very fond way, not a sad, somber way. (note: one of the reasons this blog post is devoid of photos is because I really wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t want to use 9/11 images, and I just wasn’t feeling any other images. I do think, in time, I will go back and add photos of NYC, of some of the people, places, and whatever else that really made it a special time and place in my life.)

Not a day goes by where I don’t think about NYC, and I feel like one day, if my finances stabilize, I may end up back there. That’s not in the near future, for sure, but in the distant future, much like that Monday Happy Hour, anything is possible.

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