I moved here in 1999. My parents were alive and when I took one of my long, epic walks around the city, I could see the Twin Towers when I looked south down 6th Avenue. Giuliani was the mayor and not the president’s moronic sycophant. People were lamenting the “Disneyfication” of New York. That was in 1999, 19 years ago. So, for my entire New York tenure, New York has been in the post “when it was cool” era.

I don’t totally remember but I think I made two trips down here that summer (after scouting for apartments, which I talked about here). The first was in June to drop off my friend Jon at his first place in the east 60’s. He found a sublet in a place for a few hundred dollars a month. It was a one bedroom with a shower in the kitchen and he had a roommate. The roommate had the bedroom. Jon had a futon in the living room that was barely big enough for a futon.

My lease started on July 1st and my parents and I loaded up a U-Haul and drove down from Rochester. I remember some fight my mother and I had in the car on the way down. She was nagging me about how I spend too much money. She was just going to miss me.

I remember watching July 4th fireworks from the roof of Jon’s building that summer. I think Josh may have been with us, before he went to Japan. We made it to New York, to adulthood, and it felt cool.

I was going to start a job in a week that I would be fired from three months later. I lived on 82nd street between 1st and York and I used to walk past The Comic Strip and there was a television in the window that showed the comedian that was on stage at that very moment. I used to be too intimidated to even go in and watch.

I think about the passage of time a lot, how things can seem like forever ago and yesterday at the same time.

I can go to Rochester for Christmas and stay in a house that I didn’t grow up in and it feels exactly like home, even though New York is my home. I don’t feel like I’ve been here for 19 years. It feels so much shorter and so much longer.

I needed to wear a suit to my first job. I bought two with my mother from Joseph A. Bank in the plaza next to my high school before I came. I think she was proud that her son was going to wear a suit to his first job.

In my first apartment here, I lived with a roommate that I don’t think I’ve spoken to since we both moved out.

Jon and Josh live in Westchester now. I thought at my age, I would too but that’s not how it happened.

In another era, I probably wouldn’t have moved here. New York had to be a little Disneyfied to make me feel safe enough to be here. Sometimes I think that makes me a coward, other times I think that’s just the times we live in.

Sometimes I wonder how much longer I have here but I hold that thought simultaneously with the thought that I have nowhere else I want to be. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about New Yorkers, we love thinking about leaving as much as we love being here.

Nineteen years. That went by quick. I should really pay more attention.