the pittsburgh year.

The move to Pittsburgh loomed large. For weeks, I chewed my thumbnail and surveyed my apartment, wondering when I’d gotten so much stuff. I stepped out the front door and studied the line of cars, bumper to bumper, at the curb, wondering how I’d ever manage to park a U-Haul. What to do with my couch? How to guarantee the return of my deposit? My orange tabby cat stretched himself asleep across my chest, and I frenzied over whether he’d handle the transition all right. I woke up to my lover and wondered how I’d stomach mornings without him, without New York, without the pigeons dutifully surveilling the sidewalk below.

The day arrived, and step by step, we delivered the baby. We unlocked a U-Haul in Jamaica, Queens, found a spot for it right outside, and the great shifting of items began. August meowed with increasing concern as his world disappeared from the apartment. On the last trip, we left our keys on the sill and took him out the door with us. Gradually, the scenery shifted from urban sprawl to the sun-soaked greenery. We arrived to Pittsburgh, parking on a slope, and moved everything to the sidewalk. Then, somehow, we took it all upstairs.

The first morning, I woke Josh so he could bear witness to my crying. I would miss New York, would miss him and our life; the absence of logistics, its problems to untangle and solve, finally permitted all the leaving to take the stage. For a moment, my world spun, but his hand steadied mine. I surrendered to some well-earned sleep.

The next morning, we grabbed coffee at the neighborhood YINZ and then set about returning the U-Haul. We piloted the loud and unwieldy thing through Pittsburgh, its infinite slopes and swerves. We dropped it at the North Shore and began the long walk back, spotting a German neighborhood and a park, quaint and rolling and green. We crossed a yellow bridge into the Strip District, grabbed a bite, and walked on home.

The sun abided, golden. You have made a home before. You will make a home again.

–

So, how’s Pittsburgh?

The question has been a bit of a constant. For months, I’ve been figuring out how to ‘story’ this place for folks who haven’t experienced it firsthand. For New Yorkers, I came to describe it as ‘a lovely exhale,’ a place where starting the night at midnight is a rarity and a single meal rarely costs $60. For folks back in Indiana, I highlighted its Midwestern sensibilities, its stunning topography, and the striking sincerity of its people.

With a year in Pittsburgh under my belt, I’ve come to understand it through a series of images: Yellow bridges, sidewalks crowded for Pride, for a Pirates game, for Fourth of July fireworks; a tunnel through a mountain that delivers you into the heart of downtown; black-and-yellow sports memorabilia along the Strip, where lines form to get La Prima coffee and the best cannolis I’ve ever had; the gobblerito, a Thanksgiving-themed burrito (and true semi-annual event) at local chain Mad Mex; the dancefloor at Lucky’s, a gay bar that must be experienced to be understood; the passing of a Thanksgiving turkey onto the fire escape, where my roommate delivers it to our neighbors for sharing; an abundance of rivers and mountains and the joy of using these as a setting for community on a Saturday.

I love the feeling of being on a plane landing in a place I’ve come to know as home. Pittsburgh has, to its credit, always met my return with gentle weather and pristine skies. The airport is comically far from the city, but my intuition has come to estimate well how many pages I can read on the PRT bus, immersed in another world as it carves its way through neighborhoods and shopping malls.

Of course, what I will remember most about the Pittsburgh year are the people. I will remember the friends who welcomed me in, wide eyes and open hearts, who belted with me on the dance floor in West Virginia and run with me through the moon-kissed sidewalks of a Pittsburgh Saturday. I could populate a paragraph with only first names and, Yinzers, I promise you would find yours. Nobody here has been too busy to know me or care.

I will miss everyone.

–

Almost a year, to the day, I will be leaving Pittsburgh. Josh and I found an apartment in Astoria, a move that makes sense for us, for him, for me. It dawned on me, this week, that my cat hasn’t been outside of this apartment building since the day we brought him into it. Soon, there will be another U-Haul, another strenuous thousand trips up and down, boxes arranged and stacked. Together, we return to make a life in a neighborhood we already love, and I know much of it will feel like an exhale, an inspiration, a light turned on.

But there is so much I will miss about the Pittsburgh year. To know a place as home is to miss it when you’re gone, and Pittsburgh has become a home. Already, I am braced for nostalgia for my neighborhood baristas and their banter, for the Saturday Farmer’s Market and its gyro stand, for the breweries I have come to love best.

Before this year, I had only either lived on my own or with a lover. I wondered, at times, if I’d missed the opportunity to live with a best friend, the Joey to my Chandler. Over the past year, I’ve had the honor of making home with one of my best friends, a thunderclap of a man who keeps a rusty tambourine in the back of his shower. Over twelve months, I’ve basked in the unmistakable ambiance of his joie de vivre, playing nodding sidekick to his afternoon making his mom’s sauce and meatballs in a sundress and Lucille Ball wig. His cigarette smoke lingers on the towel hanging from my bedroom door, and my cat has learned to adore the crunch of his uncooked spaghetti. Of course, Ross and I will continue the love affair that is our friendship, a connection we’ve nurtured since before COVID-19 rocked our worlds apart, but I will treasure these pages. To know him is a gift, and to love him is an honor.

Time, as always, ushers the turn of the page, but – for now – my thumb halts it in place. I will spend the next few days, the final remnants of the Pittsburgh Year, reading over golden beer and climbing (always climbing) the sprawling, infinite hills.

a note to my new yorkers.

The week I moved to New York, my U-Haul rental fell through. From my parents’ home in Indiana, I stared down my belongings and tried to figure out how to cut my essentials by half.

A bin of clothes, a box of mementos, a drawer of cutlery. Bit by bit, I stripped my proverbial wagon to the barest of possessions. After all, I reassured myself, I can always begin again.

I watched my Dad drive away from my building on W 27 Street, drew in a big breath, let it free. I walked back to an apartment of boxes, staring at me in the quiet. What will you make of this – this sprawling world, this concrete chaos, this blank and waiting page?

I didn’t know it, then, but I would fill it all with stories of us.

–

There’s a lot of lore about what makes a New Yorker. Most often, I hear fellow transplants regard ten years to be the tenure that earns this moniker. At a dinner party once, a woman told me New York chew you up and spits you out three times. If you stay past the third, she said, then you’re a New Yorker.

(The same woman asked me “what happens when you bring a girl home” about me living in a residence hall and turned bright red when I told her I was gay, but that’s neither here nor there.)

New York City is temporal. You can spot this quality in every corner. Trains roll in, spill a medley of folks onto the sidewalk, and clatter onward. A restaurant, having made its home for years on some city corner, shutters abruptly; a month later, it’s a 24-hour deli. To make life here is to know a community constantly coming and going, with friends and lovers fluttering in and out of the chapters like petals on the breeze.

When I think of a New Yorker, I will think of you. You, the friend who helped me spread glitter on my chest while we listened to Amy Winehouse. You, the lover who showed me the park in summer and made me cry on the train. You, the kickball teammate who greeted me each week with a kiss on the cheek. You, the neighbor whose dog refused to go back inside without watching the construction men. You, the beautiful strangers who belted Celine Dion with me on those hundred dance floor nights. You, the friend who scribbled poems with me in the aftermath of our broken hearts. You, the ones who took this gray place and injected it with a brilliant, technicolor heartbeat.

Maybe I met the New Yorker criteria in these wild mosaic years, and maybe I didn’t. I hope, when the people I remember in this chapter think of New York, they remember me just as vividly.

–

In the earliest days of my life in New York, I had very little time to pause. After work, I was running to stores to pick up essentials. On a walk home from The Container Store in Chelsea, I learned I would need to recalibrate how much I should really buy to carry home. I returned home, beleaguered and drenched in sweat, only to hop in the shower and meet a friend for beers.

When quiet found me, though, I wondered: Who would I meet in this place, and would I really be able to say I carved out a home here?

Outside my window, I see some of the leaves beginning to yellow. Annually, September brings the impossible conclusion to summer, ushering us to begin letting go and making room. As I stare, I feel time beckoning me ahead, and the logistics of a move rap sharply at my door.

Still, I can’t help but stop and think of each of you, of the moments we’ve shared and how – amidst the constant, inevitable change we called home – you each truly felt like forever.

When I go, I won’t wring my hands so heavily over the essentials I can pack into the moving truck. Clothing has a way of ceding to our yesterdays, and I’ve never been without a glass to fill my water. You, o New Yorkers, I will hoard with stubborn greed. I will hold you and our stories close for the rest of my days.

leaving new york.

I’m leaving New York.

I’m still figuring out how to tell this story, a way to pinpoint the cocktail of grief and relief on my tongue as I say it, but the facts always come out the same: After seven years, at the end of August, I’m packing up and I’m leaving New York City.

New York was the sunset of my twenties and the rise of my thirties. I’ve danced here, loved here, grieved here, belly-laughed. I’ve run thousands of miles, learned to find rest amidst the cacophony, exhaled with a feeling of home as the Manhattan skyline appeared through airplane windows. Broken heart, twisted ankle, shimmering sequin, dancefloor kiss.

Every time I go to write, the stories run into each other like watercolors. I’m making sense of the poem before the ink knows to bleed into parchment. I’m going, the time is right, I go to move, I’m dragging my feet.

I could stay forever, but I’m leaving New York.

–

I’ve started taking inventory of the stories I need to take with me. My proverbial desk is crowded with lore.

I scribble notes about the night, at Fire Island, when I woke up to pee and found a famous drag queen, out of drag, wandering our living room. I made her a snack, diced up strawberries and powdered sugar, and we talked about life in those liminal minutes. I want to remember her face lighting up, almost mischievous, as the first strawberry washed over her.

By a bullet, I mark the night I almost got punched by a bouncer at The Ritz. Over his shoulder, he had hoisted a woman from the dancefloor, and when I tilted my head at this sight, she mouthed ‘help me.’ Answering the call, a friend and I intervened, only to learn she had been found using drugs on the dancefloor, was absolutely refusing to go, and then we had barreled in. We lost ourselves in laughter on the sidewalk afterwards.

I write about my first date in the city, a French guy named Peter who kissed me after I read him a poem at the Chelsea Pier, and the way we serendipitously got tickets to a Taylor Swift concert that night. How, on my first Friday in the city, Taylor Swift performed a surprise acoustic rendition of Welcome to New York.

The night, if you can believe it, a man fell from the roof of the birthday party. Pandemic summer, and a cherished few gathered quietly on a rooftop in the eerie quiet of midtown Manhattan. A man in our party left to use the restroom, stepped off of the rooftop believing he would find solid ground. A strange sound, the startling discovery peering over, the breath of relief that, somehow, he was alive.

The time I ruined my Uber score eating Popeye’s in the backseat, even after repeat requests to stop. The blonde woman, a stranger, sharing the ride with me and laughing until tears came as I repeatedly promised I wasn’t eating and crunched the next bite.

I could keep going. I could go on and on and on. The stories I’ve gathered here, the beautiful faces populating them, the wild blur of color and feeling, I can’t bear to let a single page go.

I’ll leave my couch, sagging in relief, on the sidewalk as I go. I’ll drop books off into neighborhood libraries, donate clothing in bags, leave so much behind without thinking, but the stories? Those I will hoard and hold close.

My cup runneth over.

–

How do you know when it’s time to leave the party?

Over beer and popcorn, I confessed to a beloved New York friend that the reason I fell in love with him was the way, each night we found joy together, he believed so unflinchingly that the night could keep going. All those nights ended, sure, but he always pressed me to stay longer, dance harder, and push the next page away.

A few years ago, I started to feel my New York story closing. There was no true catalyst event, no unbearable grief or unsolvable quandary. The color within me changed, I discovered, and I started to feel at odds with the rhythms of the life I carved out here.

On trips, I’ve found myself exhaling. Oh my God, I realized many times, I am so at ease here. I started to fantasize about an apartment, somewhere gentler. About sidewalks that hadn’t claimed so much of my skin. When I’ve returned, I’ve grasped at the city’s bricks with a strange sense of knowing. It’s been time to go, and I’ve signed the lease for another year.

There’s nothing more human, after all, than to yearn for forever. I recall consoling my niece when we ran out of bread for the ducks, realizing she hadn’t yet learned to tolerate the brutality of time and its constant conclusions.

Over the past months, I’ve weighed the question: How do you know when it’s time to leave the party? Go too soon, and you might miss the night’s magic moment; stay too late, and the story could sour.

My lease was up at the end of May. By April, I wandered the neighborhood in tears, watching the train barrel by and feeling wholly unready to leave behind its rattling. I called my landlord and asked if I might stay the summer.

I’m leaving New York. I’ve gathered stories, kissed goodbye to the party, and the ending, it turns out, is being convinced to stay for another song.

dnr.

Lights up on an apartment half-emptied,
cardboard boxes littering the space
in uneven clusters, strips of packing
tape and the urgent squeak of a
permanent marker, trying desperately
to control the chaos–
that is, packing up a life.

Center stage, a light bulb
dangles just out of reach, pours
golden light over a slapdash
stack of whatever was left
to be taken away.

You enter the picture, step
with rehearsed precision, crane
your arm to unscrew the light, and
I approach, hands tentative, then firm,
I grasp your abdomen, watch you
methodically twist, twist, twist,
and I say – and the audience hears it,
but you don’t hear it – I’d sooner die
than let you fall from here.

Skip ahead a few scenes, and
I watch with wide eyes as
your words paint the darkness
of rooms you’ve known, and I ask – this
time, you hear it – can I join you there?

And I do, again and again –
volunteer to install an A/C unit so
you don’t do it alone, take a
train on your birthday, dinners and
darkrooms, shouting matches,
blurry walks on boardwalk beaches,
the rum punch blur of a frenzied love.

Cut ahead to a scene, two
men on a trapeze, your movements
sure and mine flailing, and
I release, and I reach, and
you pull your arms up,
watch me fall without blinking,
all the bones crack bleakly,
a single overhead light fades into black.

And I shout, stamp my feet, sob,
press my palms to my eyes
until my wrists are saltwater rivers –
only silence – so I sit there,
shaky breaths, my final scene,
here in the dark room I asked for,
until I rise to exit, and

Hey, mister, you say –
I hear it – and I take the
stage door, the steel latch
echoing briefly into both our worlds.

flash post: blood and water.

I hope the thought of me still draws blood. // What does that say about me?

They are twin thoughts, arriving at my doorstep in quick succession. The first twin, mischievous, revels a bit in the ruin. How funny, it marvels, Taylor Swift suddenly finding a way to be absolutely everywhere. My eyes scan the bar when we wander in and, for a second, twist in disappointment not to find you on some barstool. In the months immediately after our unraveling, what-if conversations played through my mind in a panic. I spent all that time getting ready, only to discover you’d stood me up.

The second twin sours the air and softens the heart. The truth is, I know my joy would buckle the moment I saw your sadness. It’s the very reason I had to claw free, start over, and let you fade into some old story. Heartbreak leaves behind war wounds, and we become like old people, swearing a snow is coming because our ankle acts up. I look in the mirror and confess I’m not cruel enough to win that kind of war, and then I wonder why I want to.

Does it make me a monster that I hope you’ve realized you lost something precious? When I think back to those days, I remember weathering your bruises for the small sake of keeping you company. I know that you know I saw you under the light, trembling. I made you safe in a way no one else ever has, and I hope it haunts you.

It’s a grotesque admission, perhaps, a monster wading out of the shadows. But what is more human, really? What feels more honest to this experience than wishing we could find a way to stay behind when we go?

Ours is a story collecting dust on some sun-soaked windowsill. Cracking its pages is an eerie reminder of the passage of days and the pileup of debris. To draw blood now would be to strike a person far removed from the man who left these marks. We are strangers whose past selves are trapped in amber in one another’s junk drawer.

When we broke, water flooded the room, and our lungs burned for air. The rooms have dried, those rotting floorboards ripped up and replaced, and that faucet goes untouched. Still, in the silence of a stray moment every thirtieth day, there falls a solitary drip. Funny the way the sound echoes throughout the house.