On Coming Home
a love letter
I landed in New York City last week, and the second we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, some buried version of myself clawed her way up my belly, toward my throat and out of my lips. That happens here. This city keeps every iteration of you, no matter how many times you leave.
There’s a 22-year-old Jess working temp jobs all day and at night, writing in a diner booth, pages and pages of books with no name. A 26-year-old Jess getting married in Central Park, ivory dress dragging spring petals behind her. A 28-year-old Jess hauling groceries up a fourth-floor walk-up with a toddler on her hip. A 30-year-old Jess back in grad school, exhausted, inspired, reading and writing herself back to life. A 31-year-old Jess in therapy in Midtown and Al-Anon in the West Village. A 32-year-old Jess in a black silk dress at the National Book Awards, staring at a to-do list with all her boxes checked, wondering what was next.
Every return here feels like I’m constantly stepping over shed skin. Some versions I remember. Others I don’t recognize until I’m standing in front of the building where I brought my son home from the hospital, the same building where I wrote chapters I’ll never publish.
This time hits different. I’m forty now. I’m walking these streets with a partner who has no history with me here, who sees everything with fresh, peeled eyes while I carry a time capsule with both hands. I’m showing him where I wrote, where I hid, where I unraveled and rebuilt. I’m giving him a guided tour of the woman I was, the woman I learned to love before I eventually learned how to leave.
In 2019, I was getting ready to move out of New York for good, headed to Bali with one carry-on, my son, and one last burst of faith. I decided to sell nearly everything I owned (except a box of books and a handful of keepsakes for Noah: his knit hat, his hospital blanket, a framed drawing from our first home alone together). I was 33. He was 6.
I sat in that South Street apartment surrounded by furniture, plants, rugs, mugs, and memories, and I realized I couldn’t list them in bullet point, like they were meaningless objects. Everything felt too alive, too charged. Too full of history to distill down to a word or two.
So I wrote a Craigslist post.
Within 24 hours, the post went viral. Not because it was clever, but because it was honest. Because every object we keep becomes a tiny museum of who we were when we needed it. Because people could feel, even in a craigslist post, how deeply I had lived here, and how impossible it was to leave without honoring every version of myself that once filled the rooms I was emptying.
I know you know this feeling too. We all come from somewhere, we all know what it’s like to try and outrun ourselves. New York is no different than wherever you used to call home. These places have never been just a backdrop, this city is the witness, the archive, the container that held me as I became a woman, a writer, a mother, someone who remembered who she was and what she was capable of.
Being back in New York now, I can feel that younger version of me, the one who was hungry and terrified and hopeful and determined to survive her life instead of being swallowed by the chaos and uncertainty of it. I feel tenderness toward her. I feel proud of her. I want to tell her that she’ll return here one day not to rebuild, not to escape—but simply to look around and realize she built something so beautiful after the end of that story.