Goodbye To All That?

It's been three years, as of last night, that Steven and I have been married. We both always say it feels like longer, although that's probably because we've been together for seven years, it's only been legally recognized for three. Or it might be because it's been three busy years, full of book deals and babies and advanced degrees. It's been three years and two apartments, two grad school programs, six countries, seventeen states, and one cat with a trick knee.

To celebrate we had the omikase dinner at Morimoto, where they bring out an unspecified number of dishes involving oysters and sushi and caviar and fois gras and lobster, and the meal inevitably hits a turning point somewhere around dish four where you go from thinking, "this is awesome I hope they never stop bringing food out" to "please let there only be two more dishes."

The restaurant is done entirely in white and the waitstaff is clad entirely in black and the toilets have far more options on them than any toilet really should, and it was all very Manhattan and exactly the sort of anniversary dinner I might have fantasized about back in my high school years. But most of all, it made me realize how much I miss living in Manhattan, how some teenaged part of me feels betrayed by how quickly I agreed to move to Brooklyn (but the amenities! yells my adult side, the park! the home office! the trees!).

I imagined being lots of different things when I was growing up, but there were two fantasies that I kept coming back to -- I would be a writer and I would live in New York. In those dreams I didn't ever specify that I meant Manhattan, because the only people who lived in Brooklyn then were my grandparents, and clearly no one ever fantasized about living next door to their grandparents.

I think I'm missing Manhattan more and more these days because I know that our time in New York is probably drawing to a close, that in a few months we will probably pack up our belongings and move some place quieter and cheaper and more spacious, but also somewhere quieter and cheaper and even farther away from Manhattan. At first I will insist on wearing all my old New York clothing, but after a while I will start to feel ridiculous, and I'll store my black pointy-toed boots in the back of the closet and start ordering more things from the Land's End catalog. At first I will keep my cell phone number with the Manhattan area code, but after a while that will get annoying and I'll switch to a local number. At first I will continue to read the New Yorker, but after a while I will get annoyed about how those New Yorkers think they're the center of the universe, and I will read it less and less, and the issues will pile up on my desk on top of all the other things I keep meaning to get to.