It’s been two months since we left New York to move to Atlanta, but last weekend I had a chance to revisit and refill my New York love tank.  Since it was my bachelorette weekend, though, some of the details are fuzzy…but I remember mostly everything.

Landing in New York has always carried an emotional weight for me.  I remember when I first moved there and returned home for my sister’s wedding a month in.  On the descent back into the city, I stared at the Manhattan skyline and wondered what I had gotten myself into.  Was I flying away from the possibilities of things my sister had just gained–marriage and home? Would I spend a few months here then skulk back South, defeated by the big city?  I had no idea what lay ahead, and at first that realization left me swimming in anxiety.  As time went on, it was my source of challenge and excitement–and the descent through the sky felt like a homecoming, a return to the only place that ever really understood me.  After a few years, it meant returning to dear friends and eventually, a kickass boyfriend.  Ultimately, I only left and returned to the city with that boyfriend who was now a fiance.  Then we left one last time.

I have to be honest, I expected a more emotional reaction during my visit.  At first I wrote it off to staying in Midtown on 53rd and 6th, which is a stone’s throw from Times Square and tourist central and nothing like my old neighborhood.  So, not much nostalgia there.  But then we hit some of my favorite bars and restaurants and sections of town, and I still didn’t feel a pang.  I looked around and just felt…tired.  And glad that cabs and subways are no longer a part of my daily life.  And on that final morning, when I woke up spinning and more exhausted than I was when I’d gone to bed, all I felt was an ache to be on the couch with the BF, a bowl of grits, and an episode of Chuck.

Ahh…the simple life.

But really.  It is.  So much so that on my way home from work, as the rain came down Southern-afternoon-random-thunderstorm-style, I looked up in the sky and saw a multi-colored banner above and my initial thought was, What the hell is THAT? I guess I don’t recall seeing any rainbows in New York City, and certainly not while driving.  What I remember seeing is light glinting off fifty-story buildings, not covenantal expressions of nature (funny how God’s love doesn’t change, but his expressions of it do depending on what we need).  A couple of days later, I headed to work at 6:15 am (my early day) as the sun was just beginning to rise and black becoming gray.  The world seemed asleep (I did a little, too) and I thought of the last time I saw a sunrise–during my wild and single New York days, upon returning from an extended night out, just as my head hit the pillow.  Quite a different scenario.  Then, I fell asleep beside a glass of water.  Cut to me five years later, waking up beside a thermos of coffee.  In the cup holder of a car.

And today, I was driving south on 400 just trying to get past the two exits that run between my sister’s place and mine, and traffic came to a standstill.  After a few minutes, I looked right and saw what the fuss was about: everyone for miles had slammed on their brakes in a domino effect to afford maximum viewing of a guy changing his tire on the road shoulder.  And two months ago I lived in a town where a homeless man peeing himself on the street corner wouldn’t warrant a second glance.

New York City is where I started a new life, met God, fell in love, and got engaged.  The intensity of my time there was packed into five years over which everything changed for me.  Each day was filled with highs and lows in the span of a couple of blocks.  I saw a tranny in a bra and bike shorts walking the same street where seconds later, I passed Tom Wolfe.  There was an insanity to each day that made it a place like no other.  Now I live in a place with rainbows and sunrises and dew on the grass in the morning. Now I don’t pound the pavement, I pound the brakes.  Now I have to figure out what it means to, after having fallen in love, live in it daily.

Not so simple.

I find myself wondering, now that the City Girl period of my life is over, what to do with an existence that involves more stability than ups and downs, more love than lust, more coasting than struggling.  Ha–I’m the little girl standing at her birthday party in the middle of a pile of presents, wondering what to do now that she has all she wanted.  Poor me, right?

There is a part of me that misses the uncertainty I used to hate, that “what comes next?” form of life before all its big questions have been answered.  New York represents all that to me: that heady rush of sticking my headphones in my ears, walking to the corner, and picking a direction just to see where it led.  Now most of my uncertainty comes at the end of the episode of whatever show I’m watching.  And though there’s monotony in that, there is also another brand of intensity: the slow-growing kind that greets me when I wake up in the morning and have the rest of my life staring me in the face, but loving what it looks like, even as more is added to it.  And loving who is sharing it with me.  Even on that New York corner, when I thought I didn’t know which direction I’d choose, I was already headed to this.  When you believe in a plan, all roads lead home.