Life in My Years

Is there anything in this world as delicious-feeling as arriving home after an eleven-hour-long trip, taking a warm shower, and then filling a hungry stomach with warm, deliciously marinated tofu and an icy cold, sweet, and slightly tart orange?

No, there isn’t.

The flavours of this orange that are currently bursting in my mouth as I type these words! No mortal words can describe this wondrous taste explosion! The juiciness, the freshness, the crispness, the joy that is a good Trader Joe’s orange! Sigh. Oranges — when at their zenith of orangey goodness — are the only fruit I’ve experienced in my life that has ever forced me to reassess my die-hard loyalty to the watermelon as “Best fruit in the world”.

But I digress.

The point is that I’m back from New York City and once again sitting in my living room in the Bay Area. I just got home after the long car ride from SFO and my body is still 3 hours ahead, making my eyes and brain very sleepy right now. But I thought it fitting that I should write this post to commemorate my homecoming since I made a post noting exactly when I left for New York 2 weeks ago.

So now, I’m back! I’ll make posts tomorrow and the days after tomorrow with more details about the trip, but for now, it’ll just suffice to say that it was a perfectly fantastic two weeks. It really was. New York was everything that I love about cities: loud, bright, noisy, crowded, and busy with about a million different places to go, see, watch, and eat at all hours of the day and night. And of course, the company couldn’t be beat. It felt so… nice to be hanging out all together again: Jimmy, Haley, and me. We were squished into Jimmy’s tiny bedroom, but it didn’t feel tight; it just felt very cozy and intimate. During the nighttime, the three of us would often be doing our own things in the room together, and even that felt nice and cozy like when we all lived in Vassar house.  The three of us did a lot of eating together, a lot of talking together, and a lot of eating and talking together; a lot of quiet “study-time” together, a lot of singing together, a lot of dancing together, and two very fun nights of drinking together. It was wonderful.

I miss the subways, the D’Agostino elevators, the grumpy black lobby man, Mamoun’s, Bleeker Street, and the Seymour Mark apartment B’s view of the city already. And, of course, I miss you.