Can we talk for a second about New York City?

Because I miss it.

I think about my life in the city often, much like a person might make a mental return to a past relationship in the midst of heartache or boredom, the grass being perpetually greener and all. As I type this, I’ve read one friend’s comments about missing the couple she and her husband were before kids; I’ve Voxered endlessly with two of my closest over how tragically comical the idea of “having it all” is and how it looks strangely, often, more like diarrhea than sounding like a feminist anthem; and I’m in the middle of a project with another friend, one of the themes of which is the loss of identity that occurs within marriage and motherhood.

I know. No wonder I’m on Lexapro.

But I do this often: I imagine myself back on the streets of the city, iPod in pocket and music in ears and legs just pumping, pumping, wherever the hell they want to go. I remember leaving a friend’s apartment regularly and walking the seven blocks home to a soundtrack of pop music and freedom, the seasons alternately heating my way or freezing it, but none of that mattering because I was in NEW YORK, DAMMIT! I had made it here–now I could make it anywhere!

That “anywhere” should have an asterisk beside it. And the asterisk should represent “everything I ever dreamed of before I got it.” Subtitle: My Happy Ending.

I don’t know what being a man feels like, so feel free to tell me (though that’s a lot of feelings in one sentence, so maybe you’d prefer not?). But let’s get real for a second: being a woman feels like having your body and heart torn in two on a regular basis. It feels like having a split personality: the person I was before my heart and life melded with The Husband’s in holy matrimony, the person I was before I had two children cut out of my abdomen, and the person I am now: somewhere in between and hovering all around those others, trying to figure out what still fits and what doesn’t (and I’m not talking about jeans). Trying to figure out if there’s anything left of that girl who bopped around Manhattan without a care in the world.

Then I remember: that never happened. I was never the girl without a care in the world. My shady memory has seemed to forget the days I got caught in the rain, one day in particular when I showed up to work in ripped, soaked jeans because I thought the schedule was empty but it was so not and I spent the next eight hours checking teeth while my crotch squished. I’ve forgotten the turds I went out with who left me feeling heartbroken and hopeless. I’ve forgotten the turd I was, losing people’s numbers after they paid for dinner. I’ve forgotten feeling like a ghost, inhabiting a life I had never asked for that somehow fit and didn’t, that felt full yet incomplete, that felt like the start of one thing and the end of something else.

Oh my God, y’all. I’m the same person.

Last Thursday, after the turkey had been eaten and the parade was over and we were headed to bed, I asked The Kid what his favorite part of the day had been. He thought for a moment then replied, “Thanksgiving.” The whole damn thing had been his favorite. DUH. A few minutes ago I was putting away laundry in his room (#havingitall) and I looked up at the collage of him in his halo, three years ago now. And right now I listen to him through the open basement door asking his therapist questions–a new skill he has acquired, on top of that small matter of mastering the English language in less than a year.

Christmas is my favorite season, yet this year Advent weighs heavily, it being our last full one here. In our home. In our current home. It makes me think about all the homes I’ve had, the ones I’ve said goodbye to, the house I came home to from the hospital and said goodbye to at thirteen; the house I left for college and came back to a visitor; the apartments during grad school and the fourth-floor walkup on 29th and 3rd whose threshold I exited wearing a diamond ring as I headed toward this life, here. And now we’re headed to another home, across the world, away from all we know, and sometimes I can’t breathe.

We went out last weekend with two of our favorites, and after we ate and while we drank, the two instruments at the front of the bar gained musicians in front of them and thus began the Dueling Pianos we had been promised. You’d think with a descriptor like that–“Dueling”–and with the state our world is in, always ready to pick a fight, and with the difference in keys and tuning and pianists, that it would have sounded more like a battle. Like noise. But somehow the mixture of the more than one thing, of the notes and the people and the laughter and even the tears at the back of my throat, it all combined to create something different from what was expected. Somehow the “more” of it all–the head in a halo, the Northeastern home and the Southern one and (I’m counting on it) the Australian one, the no words and now a gifted-notebook-from-a-friend-full of them, the Then and the Now and the tears and the bruises and the failures and the victories and all the goodbyes that lead to hellos–it melds and mixes and rises to create a symphony, a soundtrack that is always and never changing, that ends only to begin.