In Manhattan, and perhaps especially this past year, September comes as a relief from sweltering August and its smother-you humidity. Manhattan is city where humidity gathers in pockets; walk down into a subway platform and you’ll know the feeling instantly as oppression wraps around your head. It truly can be that bad, especially when you consider the smell and the tangibility of it.

I’ve heard this summer has been the hottest on record in a ridiculous number of years. No source there, though, besides walking outside, which I think I’ve done enough of to say, brother, if it ain’t, it’s got to be close. This past summer has been the sort that makes me want to invite climate-change deniers to my apartment, where I’d plan to shut off my window-box air conditioner units except that might be construed as cruel and unusual punishment.

This time last year, I was a month into comeback. This time this year, I feel like I’ve made Manhattan home.

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Been a long, long time, hasn’t it? How are you?

I’m good. Great, in fact. Well. Mostly.

If you’re wondering whatever happened to me, don’t feel bad; there are days I wonder the same thing. If only because some days you look up and around you and you wonder, my, where did the time go?

The past six months went a lot of places. I visited gorgeous San Francisco. By all accounts, it was supposed to be cool and foggy in the middle of June, but there was nary a cloud in the sky, and boy did I have a fantastic time, drinking horchata and riding trolley cars and visiting ruins. Eating Ghirardelli chocolate and Mission burritos.

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October 2001 was difficult for me in a lot of ways, and I remember much of it in particular moments; the one when, while striding down Madison Avenue on my way home from the advertising agency, I first floated to my father the idea of moving back in with my family. Not long after that, I sat in the office of the business manager of my department and pegged the 26th as my final day with their firm.

That latter wasn’t difficult, exactly, but certainly occurred with some finality.

Over the following few weeks, I caught up with old friends as a sort of last huzzah before I left the City. And during one of those evenings, I went out with a group of girls in Hell’s Kitchen. I always was lucky to find myself surrounded by beautiful and intelligent women and privy to conversations I was lucky to hear (always cognizant that I was being allowed to hear them, and only allowed to hear what they chose), and that night was no exception; the girls I went out with had worked at the Firehouse up on the Upper West Side, somewhere around Columbus and 84th or Amsterdam and 85th, I can never remember which. Back then, we would meet up there for drinks, then go out to another bar to continue dancing and drinking, and then return to the Firehouse, which would by then be closed. I’m not sure I ever saw the sunrise through its windows, but there were several occasions I think I came pretty close.

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I’ll pretend this ship’s not sinking.

Because, really, it’s not.

As expected, I’ve had Go West in my head for a few days now. As also expected, I haven’t minded much.

So here’s the thing: one of the reasons I came back to Jersey and with the intention of moving back to Manhattan was that I thought I had to figure some things out. It’s a phrase I used several times. I expected some deep self-analysis and introspection, perhaps? I’m not sure, exactly, if only because such phrases have always inspired me to eye-rolls. Like the whole “I need to find myself thing.”

(I thought I had to find myself once. So I started looking, and after not long at all, I did. Find myself, I mean. I was under my bed, and boy was I surprised to see me)

And so I’ve been thinking. As I’ve been writing. I’ve been thinking about MAs and MBAs. I’ve been thinking about NYU and Regis. I’ve been thinking about What I Want to Do With My Life.

As though I hadn’t been already.

It’s been a joke among my friends lately that I’ve become a bit of an academic gypsy, except without the whole eyeliner thing. The word “nomadic” has come up. A few people–including my own mother, in fact–remarked further upon the idea: that I can’t “keep running from” . . . well, I don’t know. People say “things,” but nobody’s exactly specific.

But the thing I’m realizing is that I’ve been doing what I want to do with my life. I’ve been talking about Hollywood and LA to people, and how much I disliked the “city” itself, but I loved USC. I went to Denver because I knew I sought city life but also missed nature; I thought Denver would be a good place, but after only a few months, I started missing home and Manhattan. And I really missed home. I missed my family and friends. And I was thinking of here, of Jersey, as home.

So I came home.

All those things, I wanted to do. I wanted to be here right now, and here I am.

Saturday night, I went out to see my buddies play. This was a common activity when I lived here a few years ago; I would go out to Philly usually at least once a month. I would knock a few back. I would dance. I would smile and hug my friends and laugh.

Which basically describes this past Saturday night. I did all those things.

I was just talking to my sister, telling her I felt anxious. Telling her I didn’t know what I was doing. She asked me how much thought I’d given it, and I told her: “A decent amount.” To which she replied: “Well, then, why don’t you stop? You’ve got too much time on your hands. Get on with it.”

I keep hoping for clarity from confusion, self-knowledge like some beatific epiphany–but if I heard someone say something even remotely like that, my first response would be simple:

“What does that even mean?”

The other night, I dreamt I danced twice, once in practice and then again as performance. The following evening, though, I knocked one back and I smiled and I danced for the simple sake of dancing, because, really, what other reason would one need? Is this anxiety I keep feeling just the universe’s way of telling me to stop trying to control everything and just let life happen?

I don’t know, but I’m not sure I should give it much thought, either.

After all, there’s dancin’ to be done.

Feets don’t fail me now.

I’ve been battling allergies off and on since . . . well, roughly since I got back to Jersey, I guess. Yesterday, my head felt as though someone had filled it with glue, and today ain’t a long shot better. Last night, I tried to crash early before realizing I hadn’t eaten dinner, but I found a half a cheese steak in the fridge. And it was from the local Pat’s, which makes the only good cheese steaks in town (my favorite overall goes to Jim’s, on South Street, but I’m usually blissfully inebriated when I eat them, so sober mileage may vary).

Anyway, last night . . . I just had the weirdest dreams. Besides the cowl-cloaked quasi-religious rites-chanting people in the mall, of all places, there was the dance exhibition, of which I was, apparently, the lone participant, and at which I busted a groove to, of all things, “King of Wishful Thinking,” which was apparently sourced from a car stereo and blasted through amps. And by “participated,” I mean twice, because first I had to practice-dance for it, and then I had to real dance, and I still couldn’t help mangling the rondes du jambe or the pommes du terre (I jest. No potatoes were mangled in the making of my dream).

And I’ve never even seen Pretty Woman (only parts of it).

At first I misremembered the artist as Mr. Mister, but it was actually Go West, which left me thinking: but I just got back from West. I want East, or more accurately, just North.

So now I’m going to have that song in my head all day long, but then again, there are worse things. I like that song. By all day long, I’m talking about my trip to my optometrist, which I’m actually in a very nerdy way looking forward to, because I haven’t been there in, like, three years. I hope he doesn’t bitch me out (I wear contacts I’m only supposed to use for, like, a month at a time. I’ve been using them for slightly longer than that).

Good news, though, is that otherwise, I’m writing more lately. This makes me happy. I thought I was working on a novella called Meets Girl, but I just started the second act and I’m only up to 24,000 words and it appears there’s way more than 16,000 to go. So for now I’m just going with it. It’s a post-modern literary fantasy in the grand tradition of novels about writers writing novels, so obviously I’m hoping it ends up way more exciting and interesting than it sounds on paper. So far so good, I think. I thought about doing one of those widget-y things to publicly track my word count, if only because it would so totally shame me into writing more, but they seem like more effort than I care to make. I’d really like to finish it soon, though, so that I can then finish the erotic fantasy I first finished a draft of, like, nine years ago.

Man, I’m so slow sometimes.

Anyway, tomorrow night, I’m out to see my buddies’ band play, something I haven’t said in three years or so, so if I’m scarce this weekend, it’s all that. Combined. But for now I’m off to see the wizard, who is actually my optician, but then again, fixing my eyes is pretty damned magical in my book.

You ever get to that point where you look around and you realize just how much you want to get done, but the sheer enormity of the task, not to mention the go-jillion aspects of it, make it difficult to decide where or how to even start, much less make any progress?

Because, seriously. Little overwhelmed.

One thing at a time, I’ll figure this out, though.

Could be worse, of course. I could be underwhelmed. Which is always sad.

Quiet these past few days. Sure, the rush of the holidays, garland-strung and wrapped in bows, but over it all . . .

Christmas Eve, my mother had just handed me a small gift bag, which I began to open before I was interrupted by a sound at the door I would have called a knock had it been softer and come with less urgency. It wasn’t, and it didn’t; we have a doorbell, but our nearly-midnight caller eschewed the chimes to pound on the door. The only people who knock like that are cops or panicked, and I’m not sure you want to see either on your doorstep on Christmas Eve at 11 at night.

I set the bag down and opened the door to find my uncle/neighbor on our porch, his eyes wide and startled and confused. He’s not really my uncle; I just grew up across the street from them, thirty years going now, and so I always called them my aunt and uncle. That was always just the way of things.

He didn’t ask for my mother; he demanded her.

My aunt had been sick for a long time, I knew. Cancer. Of the just about everything, I think. I’m not sure. I’d never asked for the details, but I knew it was going on years by now. It started before I left for California, but I’d thought it had gone into remission.

It had. Until it went into remission from remission. Came back with a vengeance, like it was indignant it had been beaten, however temporarily, and it intended to make up for lost time.

I got home a couple weeks ago, now. I’d planned to stop by to see them, but put it off; almost the holidays, I figured, and they were probably getting ready for the stress and festivities at the same time that my aunt was just trying to survive to see her daughter graduate from high school. It seemed doable, but only because her daughter is now a senior and will be graduating in a few months.

I got this information from my mother. My mother graduated from nursing school nearly two years ago now, and she’d been stopping by my aunt’s house fairly frequently, or as fairly frequently as my aunt chose to invite her. My aunt was a very private person, which my mom respected, but then, my mom was a nurse, which my aunt at times probably needed. She was a very sick woman, my mother had told me, but she seemed to be getting through, at least for now.

I figured I’d wait until a little after the New Year. Things die down a bit, you know? After the fuss and the stress, after the pecan balls and egg nog, after no one’s buying things to wrap anymore. When life got back to normal.

My uncle was demanding my mother because life was about to get to that singular point from which it doesn’t return to normal, if only because you realize normal’s different than you thought.

I turned around to grab my mother. I had been drinking, of course, its being Christmas Eve, but my uncle’s tone and my knowledge of the situation kicked me into full-on emergency mode. I got really, really calm as I took my mother’s hand, as I followed my uncle back across the street to his house. Along the way, he mumbled something about my aunt passing out, that they couldn’t rouse her.

A police cruiser pulled up as we crossed the street. My uncle paused as if uncertain, more like a full-body stutter than anything, before he gestured wildly and then continued on toward the house. I told the cop, as he stepped out of his car, that so far as I knew, my aunt was unconscious and unresponsive, then continued toward the house myself.

I don’t know why. My mom’s the nurse, not me. I guess I just wanted to be available to help, however I could, in however small a way.

I held their storm door open for the cop, who followed the noise toward the bathroom, where my aunt was unconscious. I don’t know; I never went that far. Instead, I pulled the mechanism that would hold the door open because, even as I’d walked in, another cruiser had pulled into my driveway and two more cops were crossing the street.

I only managed a step or two into the house. I didn’t know what I’d be able to do, if anything at all, and then I looked up the stairs to see their daughter descending the steps. Her mascara had already run, and she looked panicked and confused and like she didn’t understand. She seemed about to look toward the bathroom, but I reached out for her hand, and then suddenly she was hugging me tight and crying onto my shoulder. Which surprised me; I hadn’t seen her in years, and in the meantime she’d grown up. I just held her a moment, while she cried, and then I ushered her out of the house. I figured she didn’t need to see what they were doing, that we should just let the paramedics do their job, that they would let us know if we were needed for anything, and I hoped we weren’t, because she was crying and I wasn’t sure what further use I’d be, which was fine considering I figured I’d found use enough.

I stood with their daughter until other family members arrived; one of the better things about living in suburbia is that everyone’s a block and a half away, in some cases.

I stood and watched as they wheeled my aunt out. At least, I think it was my aunt. To be candid, I averted my eyes when I saw her partly clothed body, and even then, it really didn’t look like her.

One of the cops was a buddy of mine, guy I’d graduated high school with. He asked my aunt’s name, recorded it in a little notebook like a detective might use. I gave him the address, too, as if I didn’t realize he’d had to drive there, because I hadn’t.

I was still stunned. I was still hoping my aunt would pull through, still denying the reality of the situation, like maybe I could determine the outcome through sheer force of will alone, like if I just denied the possibility that my aunt might not make it, I could keep it from existing.

In a way, I don’t think I thought it did. In a way, I couldn’t believe she wouldn’t make it to her daughter’s graduation. Of course she would.

My mother was standing in the doorway still, her head against the jamb, crying. The cops told me I should maybe go comfort her. I nodded a little dumbly, and went and hugged her; by the time I led her back across the street, back home, the street was clear again. Like nothing had happened.

Before it all, I’d been drinking enough so as to be tipsy, if not loaded, but all that’ll sober you up quick. I poured another glass of wine as I sat down, still a little jarred, still a little shaken, mostly a little numb and uncertain.

My uncle called ten or fifteen minutes later to let us know that my aunt hadn’t made it.

Only ten minutes away from Christmas.

She didn’t make it to see her daughter graduate, but she spent her final moments with her, so that must count for something, I think.

Then again, it’s the kind of thing that makes you want to make sure everything counts for something.