I bought a one-way ticket to New York City.

Some projects are easy to tell you about. I think I've mentioned my horror novel about dentists a handful of times over the last year, even though I've only just finished it. I talk about my essays on the classics of pagan cinema, I tell you when I've got a new short story or a column.

But I haven't told you about New York. 

Oh sure, I've mentioned it. I visit, I take gorgeous pictures and shoot video of how I love the city, how I honor her by being loudly myself. But I'm done visiting. I'm done returning home to Maryland and hopefully to anywhere else. I want to reverse the order of return so that I'm always going back to New York. Visiting is for everywhere else. 

In another timeline, I'd have been born a New Yorker. My grandparents were both born there; a hundred times I've walked past the church on Fifth Ave where they were married and never gone in. My mother was born in the city. Through conversion and misadventure, they all left that church and that city behind decades before I was born. A thousand reasons why I want to be there, and birthright hardly registers. I've never felt like I was from anywhere. Might as well choose somewhere great to belong. 

And I do belong. My friends who live in New York are only surprised it hasn't happened sooner. My friends who live elsewhere immediately agree that this move tracks with what they know of who I am. Everywhere else I have been, I have felt like I was too much. I've been stopped in the street wearing my regular clothes and asked who I was cosplaying. I've been asked (to my barely concealed glee) what in the hell I'm doing in a place like this in all kinds of places. Nothing is more clear than the signal that I don't belong. 

That's not to tell you that moving to New York City is easy. Gotham has played her usual tricks: I dodged no less than four sublet scams before just asking around and taking direct referrals from friends. The city is expensive and she makes everything harder than it needs to be. Am I bringing six suitcases to a fourth-floor walkup? You bet I am. Am I hunting for another apartment before I even unpack? You guessed it. Am I taking tips on listings before they go live? Write back and tell me what you know. 

What I know is that I can learn to feel at home anywhere, but in New York it happens at once. I don't have to acclimate and I don't struggle to understand what people see in a place like that. What I see in a place like that is myself. 

Egyptian existentialist author Naguiub Mahfouz said, "Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease." I am weary of escape, but still perfectly willing to pull one off. What I want now is the place that makes escape seem unecessary, even silly. 

So I bought a one-way ticket to New York City. 

Concrete jungle wet dream tomato, 

Meg