After we broke up, I moved to New York for a month.

I didn’t move to NYC to escape the inevitable wreckage left over after even the most loving break up.  I moved because I wanted to shake up my life.  I realized that I blamed Michael for some of the routines that I was unhappy in.  And that’s bullshit.  I am responsible for my own life and and my own actions or inactions.

I decided to go to New York for a month because being away wouldn’t give me the space to feel sorry for myself, or the time to lean on routines that I knew I wanted to change.  Your routines and thought processes are like water…slowly over time, they carve canyons into your life, and it is difficult to redirect them to flow in a different direction.  The walls of the canyons get higher and higher over time, and the ways you think trap you.

A month in New York would upend my day to day, it would be a dam across the riverbed of my routines, and change the flow of my thoughts.  And maybe I could rechannel them to carve some new paths that might serve me better.

I lived in New York half-time, for five years, when I was in my late twenties.  It was a time when I drew the roadmap of who I was going to be as a young adult, mostly by trying things on to see if they would work.  My hair color changed every few months, from dirty blonde, to platinum, to a regrettable Cruella de Ville black with a bright blue and white streak.  I worked in production for MTV Networks, and moved back and forth to NY every 3 months.  I pierced my eyebrow, my ears and my navel.  I lost my third virginity in my ex-girlfriend’s Soho apartment while she was in Los Angeles.  (The three virginities:  With a woman, topping a man, bottoming for a man.)  I had my first real love with that man.  In a few years I went through two of the most heart-wrenching life-changes I will ever go through, but I also had many of the happiest moments I’ve had in my life.  I got thoroughly and solidly heart-broken by my first love, and then unintentionally broke a few hearts in the aftermath.

Who would I be this time in New York?  And what would my roadmap look like when I returned?

—

The Saturday of Labor Day weekend.  There’s nothing like walking the streets of New York with my headphones on, feeling slightly sticky in the late summer morning.  I don’t have any obligations today and no one needs me right now.  Nowhere I have to be, and nothing that I have to do, but the everything that I want to do is endless.

Marry Me?

Above 5^th Avenue, a skywriter spells out “Marry Me?” and I feel like someone punched me in the gut.  But the hurt is a beautiful and bitter combination of sadness and joy.  The lonely, still wounded, part of me wonders whether anyone will ever make a grand gesture to me.  The rest of me stops like a Times Square tourist and takes a picture of the sky, fiercely happy for the world and for the person who is answering that question.  And fiercely happy that most of me is filled with wonder in this specific moment, and not hurt and anger and fear.

I walk through the Union Square farmer’s market, to the gym and then head uptown.

It is an amazing day of reconnecting with my second city.  The design meets technology show “Manus x Machina” at the Met.  A walk by the Great Lawn with Beth Orton in my headphones.  A single origin expresso at Irving Farm Coffee Roasters.  I’ve missed you, NYC.  I’m halfway thru my month here and I think it’s probably time to get back into another LTR with you.

Manus X Machina at the Met.  Who knew that I always wanted to wear a bone dress?

A 3-D printed Iris van Herpen dress made of orange epoxy

The sun sets down a long East Village canyon.  I open up my laptop at a neighborhood coffeehouse.  I’m reminded that these small moments of creativity and being alone recharge me, center me, fulfill me as much as the big moments in exotic places that I usually write about.

East Village streetlamp.

The period after a break up is weird.  I want to put myself in a “single” box for a while, not because I like being single, but because I wonder if I’m capable of dating someone right now.  But then the newly lonely part of me wants reassurance that someone, somewhere, is going to like me again.  I want to know that I didn’t just close the door on my last chance at love.  And I recognize that half of these fears and thoughts cartwheeling around in my head are ridiculous, but that doesn’t make them fade into the background any faster.

Being wounded doesn’t make me less open to love or to infatuation.  It makes me more susceptible, because my defenses are down.  I admit, I’m fearful more than I normally am.  I second guess myself.

But is that a reason to not allow myself to like someone?  Does it invalidate a crush that I might develop?  Am I supposed to build walls to protect myself while I am vulnerable like this?  Or should I build walls to protect other people from me?

Fire Island sunset.

We’ll see.  Hopefully neither.  I don’t want to live my life building walls for either of those reasons.

Next up…the roadmap forward.  Or at least looking forward.