Dear Pittsburgh: An Open Letter

Dear Pittsburgh, 

I know it's been years since we've been close, but I always love picking up with you right where we left off. I'm writing because I've changed so much in ten years and I need you to remind me of who I once was. I hope you are ready to accept me unconditionally despite the way I doubted you, and to remind me of the sparks that I know still live somewhere inside me.

The reactions to the news that I'm leaving New York for you have ranged from shock to horror to morbid curiosity. Panicked cries of "WHY!?" follow me everywhere,  New York desperately begging me to stay in all its sundry ways. It's hard to explain to someone who's never known you the way I have. Someone who doesn't appreciate your worth. It's hard to explain, especially when New York City has been so deeply, intrinsically seductive. 

Like, the creaks in the floor at the Wrightsman Galleries in the Met are the most beautiful sound in the world to me. The pavement on the piers at Brooklyn Bridge park is still screaming against the thousands of steps I painstakingly took there, the weight and the anxiety I desperately ran off, night after night after night. The drawers in the dresser I gave to an old Polish lady in the East Village still open and close every day to the hum of the city. And the food; oh God, the food.

I know New York became home even when I didn't want to let it. I know that my friends here were the brightest spots of color on the greyest, drabbest background. I know that, without these oppressive buildings and people and air and ethos, I would never have been stripped away to become something hard, but essential.  I know that my heart is tearing open against letting go of the best man I will ever know.

But still, your steel beam cradle calls out to me.

I want to sit in the window with the bullet hole at Danny's Hoagies and wipe grease from my chin. I want to kayak down the Mon and split the film on top of the water with my paddle. I want to hear the sound of the tires going up an old road with bricks made of butter. I want to hand out waxy cartons of orange drink at Halloween and lie down on the floor under my Christmas tree in December. I want to remember what I was, and to forget what they made me. I'm coming home. 

See you soon.