I miss New York. I realize that it’s a cliché to say that I love NY and to explain the ways I miss it, but it’s true and I will explain… mostly because I can but for whatever reason, almost because I need to.

I miss the smell of New York. Today my senses searched for the familiar scent of the city and when it wasn’t found I felt loss. Like it wasn’t there when I needed it. That smell of old and new that collides creating a feeling both familiar and newly discovered. Old world and new life. It’s an ever-changing yet, paradoxically, ever-present smell that seeps into you and becomes part of your being in ways unexpected and somehow not at all surprising. Like an old friend you’ve just met.

I miss seeing the layers that make up the city, and make it something great—everyone co-existing at such speed and stamina that the hum can be heard if you listen beyond the horns and the sirens and the voices. If you just listen, it has something to say. And part of the beauty is that it says something different to each and every person. It gives to you what you give to it. Some days it’s the sound of a grand and golden symphony and some days it’s a lone and smokey song being played in a piano’s minor key.

And I miss the way Manhattan vibrates. It has a pulse belonging to the dreamers that left lands and arrived there to begin anew. Arrived perhaps missing the familiarity of what they called home, hoping to make a new home for themselves, for their families. Some arrived with little, some arrived with a lot, some stayed, some kept on…

But for what it’s worth, I left what I knew and arrived in New York to build new experiences, to ride an adventure, to live, to dream. And I left there feeling like I was leaving a home. However possible it is to feel at home in more than one place, I feel now.

I miss New York. I miss the smell, the heartbeat, the (4am) pizza. But for all the ways I miss New York, I miss the New Yorkers I know even more. A new city I can live in and new people I will meet—but there will never be anyone like the friends I’ve come to know and love there. No experiences will ever replace…

In a way, I feel like it’s my own inner New York to which nothing will be compared.