Old Home Place

Over the weekend, Shawn and I traveled back to our old home turf. The real purpose of the trip was for Shawn to attend a baby shower for our friend Sara, who is due at the end of October. Unfortunately, we ended up visiting her in the hospital, and it appears that she will now be due today! Welcome to the world, baby Brian Seth Wilson!

I’m not sure how to put this, but with each visit to The City, I feel like I always have a second, underlying purpose: to figure out what my relationship is to New York. The City became a part of my fabric in the five years I was there, and grew to be like a friend to me. And an enemy. And like those complex relationships you often have with certain friends, I am always trying to figure out if I love The City or if I hate it.

Poor Shawn. As we walked through the city streets, I would start nearly every sentence with, “Well, now that is something I love about The City,” or, conversely, “God. I hate that about The City.” This constant back and forth probably made her crazy, since she loves the city wholeheartedly; like a bosom buddy.

I am always trying to make sense of things, and New York City puts this personality trait into overdrive because everything in The City is out in the open, is raw and present. The problem here is that one cannot make sense of The City, there are too many variables. To try is to flirt with insanity. Yet still I try.

In the end, I had fun last weekend, but I mostly had fun because of the people I had around me, old, good friends. We ate sushi, we drank wine, we walked to favorite pubs and old streets, and as good friends are prone to do, we picked up right where we left off.

As Shawn and I rode the A Train back to JFK airport on Sunday, sitting across from us was a stinking bum chugging from a quart of malt liquor. At one stop, the door opened and he stood up to throw his empty bottle into some bushes by the platform. Through the open door came the soft sunlight and cool fall air of the north. At that moment, I was able to distill my conflicting relationship with the city down to one sentence:

At the same time, The City represents everything I can’t take with me, and everything that I am willing to leave behind.