what happened last week

I was at the gym, using the abductor, or maybe it was the adductor, and mulling various developments in my life. I was thinking, specifically, about how I am looking for a new job - which is essential since my current position is temporary and will end in several months - and am considering a significant career change. The consequences of this decision affect everything from my earning potential to my romantic prospects, and in particular may entail a relocation away from New York City, where I've been living for the past year and a half. My mother, whose voice has its own dedicated channel in my mind, urges a course of action that would take me far away from NYC, soon and probably forever, but that would be safe and in some ways easy. I was listening in my head, that evening at the gym, to her insistence on this path, and found myself automatically responding (also in my head) that I didn't want or intend to leave New York, at least for a couple of years. My mother's voice asked why, in the sort of skeptical tone reserved for questioning a child on why it wants to keep a house-invading spider as a pet. My automatic mental response to her question was, "I don't want to leave New York. It's home."

In some sense, this thought has to be discounted, because it occurred when I was at the gym, which is the most serene and happy place to be, at least mentally. But it was an automatic thought that I didn't need to formulate, and that makes it stronger. It happened all by itself, that I called New York home. It's been a while since I've thought of somewhere as home, and even longer - college? - since I thought of somewhere as home while still living there. I did not think, when I moved here very reluctantly last summer, that New York would be the place that would become home for me, but it has. And I did not intend or anticipate that I would become the type of person whom I thought of New York as being populated by, but in some ways I have. This business, of living one's life and becoming the person one is going to be, is tricky stuff.