I remember being in my local coffee shop in Manhattan. It was October and the leaves were falling, like me. The coffee shop where sometimes the drinks were decent but most of the time it was disgusting stuff. You remember don't you? 'Course you do, you worked there. I always came in only to see you. A cliche I know, but you did believe me for a long time when I said I worked from home and didn't want to walk too far to get some coffee, so I settled for clump of coffee you served. Stupid lie, you told me, but you smiled when you said it.
It was that day in October when I first got the courage to say more to you than just "Americana please". You let me embarrass myself for so long until you finally said "It's Americano." I blushed a deep red and you laughed. When I was about to leave you told me the coffee was on the house. "I love you, no I mean I love that!" I couldn't breathe. "That's a relief" you said, with that smile. I still couldn't breathe. From that moment I was ruined.
All of a sudden it felt like New York was ours. We shared it. You went wild for the crisp air and beautiful snow during winter while I stayed near a fire. I soaked up the sun and heat in summer when it was too hot for you to leave the air-conditioning. You loved the never ending noise of a city alive and I loved the never ending array of people who brought it to life. That was us, two halves who, together, had everything the city could give us. Until it wasn't.
Over the years it was like the winter snuck in through the cracks and tickled my feet before creeping up over my bones. Folding itself around me, over and over. It wouldn't have made a difference had I set a forest on fire and stood in the middle of it. It made me deaf and blind to you. Numb, actually, now that I think about it. And I couldn't stop it.
What was it like for you? Did the heat grow through you like anger? Did the summer boil your blood? Is that why you left so often, to go out and drown yourself in the constant roar of the city, so loud that it would conceal your own explosions?
You found me saying more to strangers in the street than I would to you. I always had to fight my way through crowds to find you. Eventually we both stopped looking.
So I left.
As I knew you would, you didn't search for me. I tip-toed out during the night you were away to spare you having to explain to your friends that you watched me leave. You came back to space that could be filled with someone new. That was that.
As atonement for my actions, I leave you Manhattan. You always needed it more than I did. The streets, the avenues, the falling leaves. I've gone west to settle on the beach. When it gets blustery I'm going to shout out my apologies into the wind, hoping they make it to you. Like how sorry I am that I didn't love you enough or that we ended up the way we did. I wish things had stayed the way they were at the beginning. But through the seasons and over the years, like everything else, we changed. I loved you back then, I do now, but after a while we weren't us anymore and I fell in love with an idea of us that I started to imagine. An ideal us that we could never come close to but that's where I stayed for so long. I shouldn't have.
Please have Manhattan, because I can't have you.
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