A reason, a season or a lifetime

This is going to be about New York City. If you don't love New York City, read no further; this might bore you to tears.

I believe that I fell in love with the city in stages. It came fleetingly.

I grew up just outside of New York, my parents both native New Yorkers -- first-generation Americans of immigrant parents. There are pictures of me taken in Central Park from before I can remember. Sunny picnics, me a baby. I was born in Manhattan, in a hospital that no longer exists.

Months before I was born, my parents, my 11-month old sister and my maternal grandparents moved, together, to a suburb just outside the city. I like to think they were awaiting my arrival. The year was was 1965. Women wore girdles.

I arrived that hot summer. I spent my first twenty or so years on a sort-of-urban, sort-of-suburban street, high on a hill overlooking the Hudson River.

As a younger child growing up a mere twenty-minute drive from the Upper West Side, New York was mostly a hassle. The city was a place adults always, annoyingly, wanted to travel to. This seemed to involve extensively detailed planning, parking and taxis and walking in uncomfortable shoes.

By high school, New York had become a place to come on weekends--if you were lucky enough to have a friend with a drivers' license and a car. We'd drive straight down Broadway into Manhattan, park near Washington Square Park and spend the day dipping our toes into the danger and the intrigue and the millions of lives taking place around us. We'd leave in the late afternoon, exhausted and giddy, and not come back for months.

When I got home from college, I moved back into the house I grew up in for a few years. This is a story for another time. I knew of nowhere else to turn to plan my escape, so I turned to New York. I found a job -- the first interview I went on that didn't require a typing test. At 22, with a B.A. from a good school and solo travel abroad under my belt, my first career decision came down to my typing skills (or lack thereof).

I started working in Manhattan as a commuter, miserably still living in the house overlooking the Hudson. Through my work, I started dating a man who was a few years older than me. He had relocated from the South specifically to live and work in New York -- he didn't much care wat he was doing, as long as he was doing it here. He adored the city, and pulled me into it with a kind of determinaton that had never occurred to me. For th first time I saw Manhattan as he did: a deep, dark river of possibility that one could dive into for its underside, its vibrant strangeness.

Several years into the relationship -- with the boyfriend and New York -- I started working on Wall Street. I think I started appreciating the physical beauty of Manhattan for the first time then. Being surrounded by water has always felt right, to me.

I finally moved into Manhattan about 15 years ago, in an argument with that same boyfriend. We wanted to live together, but he refused to leave New York and I refused to leave Brooklyn, where I'd finally happily planted seeds and started spreading roots. He won the stalemate. I moved into Manhatan. We broke up. I kept the apartment. I've never left it. My husband and I have lived here for almost a decade.

This morning when I woke, I realized the date: September 12. Yesterday was grey and drizzly and unseasonably cold -- the first not-piercingly-blue September 11th since the one that changed us all. It was here in this apartment that my husband, not yet my husband, came home to me on that other September 11th. Covered in ash and soot, stinking of smoke and sweat. Dirty and silent and a different man. I wondered if he, if we, if this city, if the world, would ever be the same. I don't know if we are.

With this rushing through my mind this morning, something I read recently dropped into my mind. It was about love. On first skim I'd thought, oh no, this is too schmaltzy. But when I tried to prove it false, it withstood my own internal arguments.

It was a passage based on the premise that love is always brought into one's life for one of three purposes: a reason, a season or a lifetime.

This is my interpretation.

If love has entered your life for a reason, it has come to teach you something. It will likely be painful. It might be brief. There is something you need to learn, you will learn it, and the love will move on.

At other times, love will arrive for a season. Like the winter of your discontent, or the springtime of your marriage. Whatever the details, it happens like a season blooming--coming slowly into abundant life, becoming gloriously full, then slowly fading when its natural course has run.

Happily, there are also times when love comes ino one's life for a lifetime. This is love that will always be with you. It will stand every test of time.

It feels strange to say this, but I don't know which category my marriage falls into. On different days, I hope that time will categorize it differently. I don't know what category my current extracurricular crush falls into, either. Will it even amount to a category?

With New York, on the other hand, the relationship is clear. No matter where life leads me, I will forever love this city. I find comfort in this. We are tied together forever -- she was here before me and she'll be here after me; my experience of life has been woven inextricably into New York. The crowds and the frustrations and the slivers of magic she offers up with sudden reckless abandon; the bounty of New York, for me, is the promise of always having at least one more chance at choosing a completely different kind of life. Or sometimes, maybe not equally good but sometimes just enough, a completely different kind of day. I will love her forever. For this alone, I am truly rich.