We aren’t finished.

Let me make this clear. I don’t like you. You’re tawdry and you’ve got expensive taste, but not good taste. You think a cup of coffee should cost five dollars but you also think it should taste like a shot of medicinal rub. You think you’re worth twenty bucks to enter, and like all cheap whores, you smell like poop pretty much all the time.

But for any wrongdoing I could blame you—there are a lot, don’t let me belittle them—I love you. There are a million stories blowing through your ravenous streets and they are all so, so interesting. There are friends I have not made yet in New York. There are stories that start drunk one night on wine and laughter that have not ended yet.

I will be back. I do not know when. You have taught me the savagery of a million people. You have taught me how to be lonely in a crowd. You have taught me how to dote on every dollar like a child. You have taught me that people will never walk fast enough, that pizza crust is twice as thick as a cracker, that fresh air really can smell sweet. You have forced me to see the face of inequality, and that one time you also forced me to watch a homeless man pee on the door of a cafe. While I was in the cafe. At least it wasn’t a screen door.

Point being: you have shown me many things, some of them were rats, and it’s time for me to learn somewhere else.

We’re not finished, don’t get me wrong. There are a few scores too many in your column, New York, and I’m going to win those points back. I may very well be another white twenty something in Queens, which is the new Brooklyn, haven’t you heard?

And god bless me that I might never wear knit caps and whine about my parents in overcrowded bagel shops near the L. I look terrible in hats.

I am somehow not cool enough to always be broke and drunk on craft beer, dumping my money in whatever creative habit I have halfspun dreams of turning into a career at some dotcom job that shouldn’t exist anymore. But somehow, New York, neither are you.

We’ll see about this, New York, we’ll see. I’d tell you to not forget me, but you will. Amnesia comes with insomnia. Never sleep, big city.

I’ll see you on the other side.