"I'm changing I'm changing I'm changing: I've changed! Redemption, transformation - God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?"

My happiest moments in New York are those where I feel true ownership of this city. Or maybe that's saying it wrong: it's when I feel true ownership of my presence here, my decision to come, to stay.

I sat on the stoop this afternoon to finish Goon Squad, and the late-fall sun was hitting the crests of the brownstones across the street, and the trees are starting to turn, and the city smelled, for the first time, not like garbage or sweat or just sheer human presence, but really, truly, like fall, thick and crisp, like change. A woman walked down the sidewalk with her daughter and called her "angel eyes" as the toddler pulled leaves out of her tiny pink shoes. And people were coming home from their Sunday errands with bags of toilet paper, and couples rode by slowly on their bikes, and no one was yelling. The sky was moving like it was made to, the clouds like someone was gently pulling them on a string. I sat on the stoop until the beds of my nails were purple with cold, and if you won't judge me I'll tell you that I had to swallow hard to stop from crying, suddenly seized by such intense cherishing for my small piece of this huge city, so terrified by the realization that the trees were changing and I almost missed it.

Maybe this is all anyone here is searching for - these moments when it feels like every decision that brought us here was intentional, purposeful, meant to get us to exactly where we are.