Eyes Closed Tight, My Ears Open for the Boat...

It could be the residual excitement from the Bronx Bombers winning their 27th World Series Championship, or the barrage of NYC-Pride-filled status updates that littered the virtual pages of Facebook shortly after. Maybe it's the season, and the fond memories I have of the Empire State in the fall, or the rumors that there will be a couple of vacant teaching positions at my high school alma mater in 2010. Truth be told, all of these things contribute to this feeling, but they are small pieces; each one is an estuary, branching off from the ocean whose waves have been crashing over me yet keeping me afloat for the past two and a half years. And like any ocean, the tides have their ebb and flow. But it's high tide now, and the waves are gathering like a tsunami. I feel it now, more palpable and powerful than anything I've ever felt before.

It's New York. For some, an ocean of concrete, teeming with bodies, rest and motion; lives lived vivaciously in the silhouette of the City that Never Sleeps. But that's not the New York I pine for. Instead, it's backyards and back roads. It's towns with stoplights you can count on fingers. It's a place that's been built with snapshots of my youth, and held together with memory and familiarity. It's home.

If you go back a few entries in this blog, you'll find a couple more sentimental rants about how much I miss New York, and even a couple about how NY is not my home anymore. If you go to my Facebook and read the notes, you'll find a few more. There's even a couple of similarly-themed ramblings in a short-lived LiveJournal that I started when I first moved down here. (I could easily make a Brett Favre waffling joke here, but I think the concept is dated now, and there's nothing sadder than outdated references. Wait a minute... fuck.) The bottom line, though, is that I've been wanting to move back to New York since the moment I've left it. Sporadic lengths of occupational satisfaction, mixed with temporary periods of complacency (not to mention a crumbling economy) have managed to keep me here. I'm not going to complain about that, though. My time here has allowed me to gain some valuable experience, have some incredible nights (scattered among a multitude of mundane ones and one or two horrifically bad ones) and, most importantly and most recently, to meet someone very special. I can't discount anything that has led me to this exact moment, because it's all part of the long, strange trip. The yearning has never subsided, though, and I don't think I've truly realized, until just recently, how much New York means to me.

Last month, my girlfriend and I drove from Florida to Charlottesville, VA to see my buddy Brett, who has been one of my closest friends for close to fifteen years, get married. I knew that there were going to be things about this trip that would make me miss New York terribly, but it was unforeseen and subtle details of the weekend that truly tugged on my hometown-heartstrings. Things as simple as the changing leaves and the mountain backdrops of the scenery that flew by on I-95. The first time we stopped for gas, and I stepped out of the truck into an unexpected and almost bitter cold. I welcomed it. I basked in it. (Please realize that I live in a state where it's at least 80 degrees ALL THE TIME. The month of January and 80 degrees shouldn't even be in the same fucking sentence!) I basked in it because these are the things that I miss about New York - fall hoodies and the smell of burning compost. Only home can produce such fond memories out of such everyday minutia. But here was what really got me: at one point, during the reception, I stood in a circle with friends, family and total strangers, singing "New York, New York," drunk as Kerry Collins in 1996 (or 2009, now that he lost his job to Vince again). I'm sure that the thoughts of the rest of the merry congregation were light-hearted and inconsequential. But, for me, each chorus-line kick - each poorly harmonized refrain, struck the deepest and most sensitive of nerves. Because I do want to be a part of it. I do want to wake up in the City the Never Sleeps (or, more accurately, fifty-or-so miles north of it).

If you've never left home, then maybe you won't understand my sense of urgency here. You might not know what it's like to want to fast-forward through the next six months of your life so that you can pack up everything that will fit in a flatbed and hit the highway. And the thing about it is, I'm not unhappy. I like my kids; I like my job. I love my girlfriend and the time we've been spending together. We have a future - together. That's a statement that I've never made honestly until today. I've talked to her about all of this - she knows - and, God bless her, she understands. And I understand, too. I understand that moving back to New York is not the panacea for all my problems. It's not the Rosetta Stone. In New York, I would still be a man in his late twenties that's living paycheck to paycheck and hasn't quite figured his life out yet.

So please don't read this and think, "I wish he would stop crying about how much he wants to go home," because these are not the bitter bitchings of a malcontent. They are honest thoughts, bled out and poorly verbalized by a guy who misses his home.