leaving new york is like breaking up....

The longer I am here in my new (and old) home...Vorarlberg, Austria...the less I can imagine a return to the city I love so much. New York is like a lover that is bad for me, like an addiction I am withdrawing from.... the more time passes the more I realize how blind my love was/is for this town.

I am getting closer to a perspective I despised until just very recently. It was the view of my adopted home-town by my visiting friends and family from Europe. I didn't see the dirty streets, I didn't feel unsafe, I didn't realize how much I liked to curse. To me, NYC was just perfect...not so much my life in it....but the city itself I loved ...and I still do....but I now am at a point where I am trying to figure out why that is.

What would probably make it more difficult than anything to go back is the knowledge that I would give away the chance to let my kids be kids. That innocence they can experience in this particular region of Austria (even today) is something I doubt I can preserve if I raise them in New York.
I don't know if I wrote this down already but my friend Marta just recently reminded me of how grown-up kids in the city can be. Every day, she says, she sits in the bus and listens to kids talk on their way home from school. Teens and Tweens. And, she says, you wouldn't believe what comes over their lips (suck my d*ck this, f*ck that sh*t, etc.) .... horrible. One time, she said, a woman actually tried to discipline a group of them on the bus....they cursed her out so badly she had to get off at the next stop.
This is an unthinkable situation here. People still discipline each others kids....or the youth of the community altogether. And kids respect the fact that an adult is showing them their boundaries.

I realize, that this is probably one of the few last places where these old-time costums still work. Not far from here (just over the border in Germany), things are falling apart, too. Just take the last school shooting just a few days ago. One kid ran amok and killed 13 students.

It takes a village to raise a child, is my opinion. ...And New York City is just too big of a village to be able to accomplish that.

I still miss my friends and I still do miss NY.
And that's where the analogy of the bad lover comes from. I shouldn't yearn for NY so badly and yet, I am.