Not returning, but the feeling of return. Back in the city I’m just another girl in a sweater. Not coming back, but being back—the feeling of having recently returned to a beloved city or just slipped into a favorite sweater, not unlike the feeling of having given in and put on the song whose hook has been stuck in your head. Back in the city / I’m just another / girl in a sweater. The relief of the completed action, scratched itch.
Once I crossed an ocean just to have this feeling upon coming back. Not true, but it sounds good, like the song I couldn’t stop listening to that particular month. Back in the city. I’m just another. Girl in a sweater. I wore a sweater on the plane so it would be true when I tweeted the lyric from the back of the cab home from JFK. That’s true. Back in the city I was just another girl in a sweater—sweet escape into the relative anonymity of Manhattan.
I don’t live in Manhattan anymore; to return home now is to arrive at a different destination. After we moved in, I told Elisa—who had been living just a few blocks away—that I was looking forward to when this neighborhood started to feel like home. Waiting for it. Almost anxiously, that nagging worry it won’t.
Then the other day, having come back from another place that was once but is no longer home, being struck by it, as if having suddenly stepped into sunlight. The walk two blocks home from the market, which, like the walk, is no longer new to me. Now I know how long the walk sign lasts, that it’s never long enough.
Trace of a cigarette—from where I can’t tell at first. Sweet spice, taste of fall. I don’t smoke often anymore, and other people’s cigarettes don’t always smell good to me now, but this one does. Like a gift, it reminds me—returns me, to a time when cigarettes were still new: behind Abby’s bedroom door, or on the quad of the college with the little theater where we used to go see subtitled films. Deucing a Marlboro Red slipped out of her mother’s pack, taking turns play-acting the life we wanted. It’s fall there, in the memory of the imagined future. Sweater weather.
Even seeing the woman sitting on her stoop with a cigarette see me take an exaggerated, appreciative whiff—what would normally embarrass me, to be observed this way—doesn’t diminish how happy I am: to be back, sun on my face, in a sweater again, just another.