But I’m just gonna let something brand new happen to me.  —Cee Lo Green (yes, I just quoted Cee Lo)

I never wrecked my car in New York City. Not once.

This was, of course, because I had no wheels in New York. But here in Atlanta, I do have a car. And I have rammed it into three things in the two-point-five years I’ve owned it: our garage, a Suburban in a parking deck, and most recently, The Mom’s car. Last week–January 2, to be exact–I began the new year and my first post-holiday day back at work by backing directly into her car as she watched The Kid fifty feet away. Crunch.

I’ve been comparing my current life to my New York life ever since we left, not as an act of regret or even nostalgia so much as an unavoidable study in contrasts: single vs. married, childless vs. parent, city vs. suburb, lean vs. padded, vehicular vs. ambulatory. There was a lot that was easier about my half-decade in the city. You would not have found me, for example, on my hands and knees in the kitchen, picking scraps of meat off the floor while a one-year-old gleefully tossed more of them at my head. You would not have found me comforting said one-year-old at four in the morning as he screamed in reaction to a bad dream. You would more likely have found me running around the Central Park Reservoir on a Tuesday afternoon, or eating a late dinner in the West Village before going out on a Saturday night with girlfriends.

I considered these differences on New Year’s Eve, as The Husband and I drank champagne in front of a Dexter marathon and The Kid slept off his surgery upstairs. I used to celebrate every new year a couple of miles from Times Square, all heels and cold legs and loud laughter. Did I miss it?

There’s that element of mystery that’s gone now: after all, I know who I’ll be with at the end of each night. In my city years, that mystery looked more like uncertainty, and I rarely enjoyed it because I was trying to turn the page and get to the end faster much like TK does now when we read together. I overdid everything in New York–drinking, dating, running in blizzards–and now when I think back on that time I feel the sense of heady unknowing, of excitement born from endings unseen. But then I remember the reality of coming home alone, of wondering whether all my nights would end that way, puking in a sink, and I realize how easy it is to romanticize what was at the expense of what is. Life can be in the past, in the future, or it can be right where you are. TH and I finished the bottle of champagne and fell asleep as firecrackers exploded outside our window on January first. I’m not a part of the fireworks display so often anymore, wrapped as I am in a suburban cocoon minus the street-provided “F-yous” that made me simultaneously weepy and more alive.

I remember the few occasions I crossed the river and saw the Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn: a sight impossible to behold from the island itself, within the shadows of skyscrapers. Now I see that skyline in my mind and behold trees and rooftops in reality. TH’s car enters the garage with the familiar sound of the door opening. TK sits on my lap and listens as I read him stories. And this, this is being alive. One day I’ll tell him the one about a boy and girl meeting and falling in love in a city, how the boy proposed on a rooftop on a cold December night, how they told that city goodbye to get on a plane and start a new life that begins with the word Family. The three of us will board our own plane and behold that skyline together. And I’ll know then, as I do now, that I haven’t missed a thing.