It’s true: I’ve spent most of the last couple of weeks visiting Liberty City. I hadn’t been in about a year, with good cause, because it’s a place that preys on the weak, providing in reality only rushes of dopamine and adrenaline to complement its wholly engrossing, elaborate, falsified environment, vivid but vicarious, perhaps as awesome yet hypnotically convincing to residents of our world as is ours to one a magnitude higher.

So, with that fully yet freshly behind me, my having woken up in the suburbs seems even more disorienting. I use “woken up” accurately but reluctantly: In the last 24 hours I’ve only gotten 25 minutes of sleep, from about 3:20 to 3:45 this morning. It would seem Insomnia, that coldhearted bitch, sneaked her way into my messenger bag and onto the train and into my room. I never underestimate her curious, sometimes chaotic effects. Cursing at Target’s lack of needed merchandise would come later. No, my waking up to a low-hanging sun and not one but two cats on my way out was intoxicating enough. I can never believe how calm and lovely the suburbs can be, most suburbs all over the place, where it actually gets dark at night and people retire to their homes at entirely reasonable hours.

The first thing I noticed as I listened to the radio in the car – a novel, foreign, remarkable concept – was how in the suburbs, it takes zero minutes to get everywhere. I would have fully completed my first set of errands before getting five blocks from my apartment in New York, with less stress on these old ankles. Include that there was little traffic and you have an unbeatable situation. It was uncanny.

The glory continued at my first destination. It’s family tradition/policy to pick up the newspapers on Sundays, most often at the ol’ Deborah Ann Cards & Gifts Or Whatever New Title That Kind South Asian Family Has Given It, and has been since I was growing up and sneaked along and made the face that got me the goods: For fully half a decade it was packs of baseball cards. Sprinkled in toward the end were hockey cards, right before that, single baseball cards in plastic worth more then they’d mostly ever be again, at least on the open market. For a time it was Dick Tracy trading cards, tied in with the movie of course, whose yellow and black wax wrapping I can feel right now as I type. Well, I peeked my head in there at quarter of seven and picked up the papers, looking around and what had changed, and returned those back to the car.

That was so I wouldn’t have to hold them at Dix Hills Hot Bagels. We’d stop in there every two months or so, not very often. I’d get egg bagels which taste nothing like eggs, really, but which have a fucking awesome gold color to them, with flavor to go with it. Today I’d just get a bacon & egg sandwich on an onion bagel, medium coffee, orange juice, all to go. The otherwise breezy few minutes at the shop were not entirely without incident, however. As I was leaving, I spotted in the corner a man in a plaid shirt, coffee steaming in the morning sun, sandwich to the side, paper unfolded in front of him. I stumbled on what was surely a ritual, a simple but enviable one. I know this because the man was my future self. Unfortunately I had to kill him. There can be only one.

Papers and meal in tow, I returned to the house where I grew up, and sat down. At a kitchen table. In a kitchen that’s large enough to have a table to sit at and eat off. I have a kitchen table at my apartment in the city, but the surface is two feet off the ground and it’s in my living room and I don’t even sit at that when I eat, really. I usually go ahead and call it a “coffee table” to make it feel a little more posh but it’s hardly used even for that and at best it’s used far less than my lap or the floor of my bedroom when it comes to supporting food. Plenty of sacrifices are made when you live in the city (as there are when living in the suburbs) but sitting upright at a table is one of those perhaps rightly overlooked fundamentals that when noticed makes me continue to reconsider the choices I make.

My meal stood no chance and I grabbed my coffee to make my second errand run of the morning – and it wasn’t even 8am yet! This trip would be to that suburban wonderland Target, Walmart’s good twin even though they’re virtually the same store. I arrived a few minutes after the store opened, purely for having been up so early. I figured I would be one of the few customers but I underestimated these Sunday regulars. It wasn’t packed but it was hardly empty. I fit painfully in with my hooded sweatshirt and I-give-a-damn-but-really-I-don’t BC cap. The other men in the store were all hatted, mostly baseball caps but one beret, only chosen I’m sure to match the quirky facial hair a few inches below it. I got a few things I needed but not a few others; Insomnia’s ugly head (yet pretty face) crept up as I yammered audibly why there were no fucking christening cards left, as if the remaining cards had anything to do with it. They did.

My morning is not finished but it’s nearly full. I’ve lived a day before noon, before eleven, before ten. I’m sleepy from that as the sun still rises above. There are birds outside that are not pigeons and dogs nearby that are not dragging yuppies behind them and I like it. A little goes a long way but one can have too much of a good thing. I always knew one day I’d be meant to return to surroundings similar to those of my youth. I’m terrified to consider that that day may already long have passed.