"New York Lived in Me"

Some people fall in love with people.

I fell in love with a city.

And I don’t mean
I love the buildings,
the lights,
the skyline,
or the pretty view from across the river.

I mean I love this city
like you love someone
who came into your life
and changed the direction of it.

Because New York did that to me.

It put a dream in me.

Long before I knew these streets,
long before I knew which train went where,
long before I ever had a reason
to call this place mine,

something about this city
made me believe
there was a bigger life waiting for me.

And then somehow,
I got here.

Sometimes I walk around
and think about that.

I’m here.

In the city I once wondered about
from so far away.

And New York has become
so much more than the dream
I had of it.

It has become my friend.

The kind that doesn’t always comfort you,
but pushes you.

The kind that says,
get up,
there is still so much to see.

The kind that lets you get lost
because it knows
you’ll eventually learn your way.

This city has seen me tired.
It has seen me hopeful.
It has seen me lonely.
It has seen me walk with absolutely no idea
what I’m doing with my life.

And somehow,
it never made me feel
like I had to have everything figured out.

There is something comforting
about being one small person
among millions of lives.

Everyone going somewhere.
Everyone carrying something.
Everyone becoming something.

And me, somewhere among them,
becoming too.

That is why sometimes
I think about the day
I’ll have to leave New York,

and I swear
my heart hurts in advance.

Because what do you call it when you miss something before you’ve even lost it?

I’m not saying goodbye.

God, no.

I’m still here.

I still have streets to walk,
trains to miss,
places to discover,
nights to stay out too late,
corners of this city
that haven’t met me yet.

But I already know
that whenever the day comes,

it will break something in me.

Because I won’t only be leaving
an apartment,
a neighborhood,
or an address.

I’ll be leaving the place
where so many versions of me existed.

The girl who arrived with dreams.

The girl who got lost.

The girl who cried.

The girl who kept going.

The girl who started believing
maybe her life could become
bigger than she had imagined.

How do you leave that?

How do you look at the skyline
one last time
without remembering every version of yourself
that once looked at it
and whispered,

one day.

People fall in love
and keep photographs,
letters,
old messages,
little things to remember each other by.

What am I supposed to keep
from a city?

A MetroCard?
A receipt from some tiny café?
A blurry picture of the skyline?

How could any of that hold
what New York has been to me?

Because I don’t want a souvenir.

I want the feeling.

I want to keep
the version of me
walking through Manhattan
with nowhere important to be.

I want to keep
the sound of the city
when I’m walking alone.

I want to keep looking up.

I want to keep that strange feeling
that something could happen here,
that my life could change
on an ordinary Tuesday.

Maybe that is why
I fell in love with New York.

Not because it gave me everything
I wanted,

but because it made me believe
there was so much more
I could want.

It made me curious about my own life.

It made me dream differently.

It made me bigger.

And maybe one day
life will ask me to go somewhere else.

Maybe I’ll pack my things
and start another chapter
in another city.

But I already know
there will be a part of me
that will never understand
how to leave this place.

Because people will say,

“You lived in New York.”

And I’ll want to tell them,

No.

You don’t understand.

New York lived in me.

It put a dream in me.

And I think
I’ll spend the rest of my life
carrying it.