Liam asked me from the passenger seat if I’ll ever date again. I was driving, and I had nothing ready.

I did it again. I went back to a nine-to-five. I did the responsible thing. But I keep thinking: is this it?

How do you grieve someone who is still alive? Parents talk about grieving the child they thought they would have. I think it's a two-way street.

I've been quiet here for a while. This summer I turned the noise down and asked myself the question I've been outrunning for forty-five years: where do I actually want to settle? Europe had a shot. Then New York got in the way.

In LA, lunch was twelve minutes at my desk, crumbs in the keys. In France, it takes two hours and nobody apologizes.

"America is my country, and Paris is my hometown." I was born in neither. I made them mine.

Ten years single, and a line from a chick flick just called my bluff. Do you have the love life you truly want, or the one you built to keep yourself safe?

Far from the eyes, far from the heart. I do not think it is true.

Seven years away, and New York still casts the same spell. A week in the city, the pull I can never quite name, and the quiet joy of watching Liam rediscover the place we once called home.

Is our past indicative of who we are now?

It's not so much about what I know now as it is about what I am willing to do about it.

Our home was never an address. It's the small family I made.

Now that he is nine, I wish I could go back to that hospital room and harvest those moments.