It happened on a rooftop in the Lower East Side. One of those tiny walkup buildings on Orchard Street where the roof access door has no lock and everyone pretends that's fine.
We'd brought wine. It went warm fast in the August heat, which felt like a metaphor I was too tired to appreciate.
He looked at the skyline, not at me, and said the words. "I don't know where this is going."
Four months. Four months of the J train to his place, of playlists made, of him learning the difference between Gujarati and Punjabi like it mattered, and I really thought it mattered. And now, warm wine, the Williamsburg Bridge glowing behind him, and "I don't know where this is going."
Dating in NYC is its own kind of endurance event. Everyone has one foot out the door because there's always the fantasy that someone better is just one swipe, one party, one rooftop away. The city sells you infinite options and calls it freedom.
I've done the thing before. The staying. The making myself small and patient and understanding, waiting for someone to know where it's going while I quietly knew all along.
But something was different on that Orchard Street rooftop. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was Fort Tryon Park last Sunday teaching me I could sit alone with a samosa and be fine.
I said, "Then I do." And I climbed back down the stairs.
I cried on the J train, obviously. There's a theme this week with me and crying on trains. But it was a clean cry, not a broken one. The cry of choosing yourself when staying would've been so much easier.
There's a line I keep thinking about, from an old Hindi film, something like the heart is a child, it asks for everything and understands nothing. Mine asked for that man on the rooftop. But I'm learning to be the adult it needs.
Dating in NYC will chew you up if you let it decide your worth. Four million people and still you can feel unchosen on a Tuesday.
But I chose me. On a rooftop. With warm wine.
That has to count for something.
Some exits are just entrances turned around.
Love,