Ten years ago, I was a college senior in Atlanta.

Nights, I worked at a Jewish-owned dive, the American Roadhouse. Though it was always packed, I could never understand its draw. I knew how dirty the back of the house was and what people did in the kitchen.

I alternated between waiting tables and hosting. I liked the former for the cash that was wadded in my pocket at the end of the night, but preferred the latter. I could sneak in some reading, hoping the owners wouldn't see me and put me on some menial task like wrapping cheap silverware in stained napkins or helping the bartender inventory his stock.

It's where I first read the Times. The New York Times, of course. It was the national version, not the city version, but I didn't know the difference then. New York seemed like the absolute center of the universe. Everything was happening there, every single day. "If I lived there," I thought to myself hundreds of times, "I'd see and do it all." The idea that money might be an obstacle didn't enter into my head.

I didn't have an active plan to move to New York. I didn't have much of a plan at all, but there I was, days after graduation, boarding a plane and then, a few hours later, finding myself in Harlem, dragging a big blue duffel with everything I'd need for a summer. I spent a mostly lonely three months living in intern housing at Barnard, lying on my thin mattress at night and listening to trucks clatter down Amsterdam, working by day at a radical, crazy social service agency where I'd end up starting my career.

And I stayed.

*

A couple months ago, after almost a year of being on the road, I landed at JFK on a return trip from Brazil and recognized I had no travel plans for at least six months. The thought settled into me uneasily. I knew New York now. It actually felt small. It had lost some of its shine. While there was comfort and rootedness in the familiarity of knowing where to buy groceries and discounted books and how to navigate public transportation, something else equally important to me but less nameable was absent.

And still is.