I am homesick… for New York. As soon as I boarded the plane back to Knoxville, my chest felt tight and heavy — and I’m sure my heart broke just a little bit.

I love hustle and bustle, crowds, sidewalks, neon lights, street food, and public transportation. Swiping the MetroCard is thrilling. I like ethnic neighborhoods, accents, and straight talk. I like subway art and free days at the MoMA. And it doesn’t hurt for a city to have an H&M and Anthropologie store on every street corner.

When I’m in the city, I feel healthy. The pace excites me. I joke with my family that I breathe better in congested, polluted areas. I also fall asleep faster with street noise in the background (versus the sounds of ocean waves and desert wind that most people think of as relaxing).

I’m sure this makes me weird. In this area (Knoxville), I always seem to hear people say to me, “New York is fun, but I’d NEVER live there.” “I like visiting New York, but it would get old after a few days.” Some folks have even said that they didn’t find anything interesting at all about New York City. Blasphemers!

I’ve been back in Knoxville for almost three days now, and I still haven’t been able to shake this feeling of homesickness. I listened to “Empire State of Mind” again (on loop) while driving home from work. And I got excited when I heard the Huey Lewis song “The Heart of Rock & Roll” on the radio during the local radio station’s “Time Warp” lunch just because the first verse is about New York:

New York, New York, is everything they say
And no place that I’d rather be
Where else can you do a half a million things
All at a quarter to three
When they play their music, ooh that modern music
They like it with a lot of style
But t’s still that same old back beat rhythm
That really really drives ‘em wild

I don’t what to do about my heartbreak. Looking at vacation photos only seems to make it worse.

I think the only remedy for this bout of homesickness is to plan another trip back to NYC again this summer. In the meantime, I’ll let the absence make my heart grow fonder and create a special “New York” playlist on my iPod to remind me why I love the city so much.