This Must Be The Place

This is not my beautiful house

This is a love story.

I moved to New York City for the third time in 16 years this weekend.  I’ve heard about people who get divorced only to get remarried to the same person over and over and always thought it sounded crazy.  It’s starting to make a little more sense to me.

It was 24 the first time I moved here.  I grew up thinking New York was a place you visit once per year, preferably around Christmas, to buy fake Rolexes and handbags, see the lights, and eat in Little Italy.  The city served little purpose otherwise to a proper WASP from beyond-the-train-line-Connecticut.

I considered moving to New York briefly when I was graduating college but I I didn’t like the smells, the speed, the attitude. I didn’t like cities is another way of saying that and so that consideration was incredibly brief.  

Tastes change, I changed. And so two years later I showed up with everything I owned in a 1997 Subaru Outback to move into a 450 square foot “two-bedroom” six floor walk-up above Coyote Ugly.  My first night I didn’t have a bed yet, and my Craigslist roommate wasn’t there yet, so I slept on the floor in the living room to take in the grandeur of my new home.  My self satisfaction was interrupted by a knock on the window from a drunk guy who’d climbed the six flights of fire escape looking for a way back in to the bar he’d locked himself out of.  My frist night.

“No - go back down and bang on the door harder,” I said.

“I love this place,” I thought.

East Village > Williamsburg > StuyTown. 

Single > Girlfriend > Fiance > Wife. 

Good job > Great job > I quit. 

Ten years after I got to New York, I left.  My wife and I quit our jobs, gave up our apartment, put our things in storage, and took a one way flight to Patagonia to start an open-ended trip to...well we didn’t know.

We left to hit reset on life and we gave up the apartment we loved to give ourselves optionality when we came back.  The first divorce from New York was about seeing what else was out there.

It was first in Buenos Aires, then again in Tokyo, and again in Hanoi that we realized we were city people, and that as amazing as other cities were, New York City they were not.

Driving back into New York after our flight home from Beijing I remember thinking people talk about how amazing flying into the city is, but that driving in was more appropriate, because it forces you to look up to it.  That order of things felt more suitable.

In returning my vigor for New York was re-energized.  I aimed to devour experiences, to catch up on lost time, to make amends.  I sought out people I hadn’t met and places I hadn’t been, made new friends, and appreciated the hell out of everything New York threw my way. I fell back in love.

I was talking with someone from out of town not long after moving back and they said the thing everyone not from New York loves to say about New York.

“I love to visit, but I could never live here.”  He was on his way to Little Italy.

That line is always said with the air of a person who thinks New York is theirs to view from the air, as if available to anyone who casually feels like moving in.

“Yeah, it’s not for everyone,” I almost said.  It’s what I’d said for years.  But instead I said what I was thinking.

“I know.  If you could, you would.”

That was pretty much the end of the conversation and New York and I had patched things up.

Four years later my wife was nine months pregnant and we were daydreaming about the city life we’d have with our daughter and then...COVID.  My daughter was born in late March 2020 when every interaction, every crowded space, was terrifying.  We packed enough stuff for two weeks, drove to a hospital in CT, had our daughter, and went to my mother-in-law’s to ride out the storm while the curve flattened.  The second divorce wasn’t even a choice, it just sort of happened as we relocated to the Hudson Valley to wait for things to “feel better,” back home.

While up there we’d spent a lot of time talking about coming back and saying we’d come back but deep down there was always the question; was us leaving New York this time for good? We loved upstate too. We had a baby now. We had a house. We shopped at farms, we hiked out our backyard, we had a fireplace. People kept scoffing at the idea we’d go back to New York.

“You have a baby now. A house,” they’d say.

We decide to go for it, reasoning we’d never forgive ourselves if we didn’t at least give going back a shot.

I wake up almost every day with some random song in my head (“random,” says Freud with an eye roll).  The day before our move I woke up with a lyric in my head but I couldn’t remember the song.  I kept singing:

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round

The next morning I woke up still singing it, googled it, and the first result was this, a video where the only image is the sun rising over New York City while a love song plays over it.

This past Friday, 17 months after we left New York, we pulled up a Uhaul in 95 degree heat and took in a lungful of hot trash day and dog piss aroma and knew we were home.

And without scorn or anger, New York…she opened the door, gave a smile and took me back.

B

As we aim to foster a sense of community we’re doing stuff here at Project Kathekon.

We started a book club. But you know, not like a regular book club, like a cool book club. Want to read Don Quixote with us? It’s 922 pages long - it’s going to be awesome.

Every month we pick an exercise and aim for 10,001 reps. Give it a shot?

We read other books sometimes, and then we give them away. For free. FREE! Want one?