New York City

I don't miss you.

I can't miss you.

I don't miss you because I haven't left you.

My mom keeps asking me from time to time if I miss being there. If I want to come back.

I always reply that is not so simple, but every time she catches me sighing while watching NYC in ads, movies or series she looks at me like saying "I knew you were missing it"

And of course I do. Then again, is not that simple. I miss faces, people, I miss the city but I wouldn't like to go back to what I lived or what I was doing. It was a nice stage, it had a closure and that's it. I'm here now. And anyways, I wasn't living in the city so I started longing for it even when I was in US.

Really I should be thankful. Now I actually have a reason for my chronic nostalgia. It is even socially accepted. And kind of cool -for the rest of the world, I don't give a crap about that- Those ten months are like a bubble in the circular chronology of my life, overlapping in various forms in past and present, posing me questions, dialogging with who I am and who I want to be.

Ahhh I still wander through New York City, travelling to Upstate New York a couple of times and bouncing among Puerto Rico and DC. I'm actually writing my senior seminar on a novel set in NYC. So I can smell the kebabs while waiting for the bus home, the distinctive essence of concrete and asphalt that I involuntarily catch now while running late to my job in downtown Santiago. I'm there, my heart stayed there and corny as it sounds it will probably stay there forever.

There are other plans, I don't have the slightest idea of what God has in store for the next few months and years but this I know: in NYC I felt home.

One of my favorite memories is in Washington Square, next to NYU. It was love at first sight, so every time I went to the city I managed to go there even for a little bit. It was winter, I was with my best friend and as we walked through the arch someone was playing G Harrison's "Something". We both looked at each other and smiled, then laughed histerically at that moment's perfection. I wish I'll never forget it.

Washington square, this time in Spring