Blondes on tour I still love you, New York BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

Two weekends ago, my two blonde Portland girlfriends in tow, I returned to New York City to get my fix of the urban life I left behind a little over a year ago when I packed a U-Haul and drove it north to Maine.

Since there were three of us, we decided to pitch camp at a hotel in midtown.

Now for me, coming to NYC and staying in a hotel is a strange experience. It reminds me of the time I stayed in a bed and breakfast about five minutes from the house I grew up in while working on a piece for This American Life. At once, home becomes a place you are visiting no matter how well you know or love it. Maybe this is what Thomas Wolfe was talking about.

Sex and the City never did the show where the alleged New York sophisticate suffers the shame of getting lost in NYC. My ex-boyfriend, a born-and-raised New Yorker, still cannot direct me to the West Side Highway from the Merritt Parkway, a trip of about 25 minutes. When we were together, every time we drove back into the city from points north we would have a huge battle of wills and words over who knew the best and quickest way to follow the Hudson home.

This time, that familiar choke returned right at the end of the Merritt. The question was: How the fuck do we get on the Saw Mill? No maps in the car, I called New York. Even though we broke up on the worst of terms, didn’t speak for months, got back together and then ripped apart again, have dated other people and recently fought about whether or not it’s insulting that all over again I’m dating a Jew and he’s dating a non-Jew, whenever I get lost coming to NY he’s the first person I call. His answer: "Take the Cross Island."

Okay, there’s no Cross Island right there. But there is the Cross Park and the Hutchinson. Aliya and I looked at each other and grimaced.

One might think that logic would dictate giving New York the benefit of the doubt and sticking with the word "cross." But we’re women who are in the practice of ignoring text in favor of analyzing subtext. Besides, in our female brains, anything out of the mouth of a guy is up for major "well, maybe he really meant blank when he said blank."

Reader, we took the Hutch.

Before we knew it, we were somewhere in Queens, doing a U-ey onto an "authorized vehicles only" ramp and winding our way back onto 95 through the exhaust of 18-wheelers. Like all Angels we had three ways of dealing: Aliya aggressively commanded her Hyundai, aka White Fire, as if she imagined it might sprout wings and soar over the trucks in our way. Blonde Ambition #3 closed her eyes and dropped her head against the back seat as if she were having a narcoleptic episode. And, I, like any sensible person, called every man in my life on my cell phone and asked him to save me. Needless to say, I got a lot of voicemail.

The next evening, Portland’s Blonde Ambition Tour met New York for dinner and then he took me and my friends to Shakespeare in the Park. There are moments we all have with exes when little needs to be said for everything to be completely understood, when history proves crushingly deeper than any vague future might appear to be. As New York and I watched some our country’s best actors strut their hours under the glowing lights, Central Park lush and green in the background, we continued our commentary as if we had never parted ways. Once, he put his hand on my knee and left it there, his fingers lingeringly warm through my jeans.

When I finally left NYC by bus, the Angels having left a day earlier, I called New York to say goodbye. He was irritated that I was leaving without us spending any time alone together. All of a sudden I found myself wondering where I belonged and if I belonged anywhere at all. Sometimes you can feel yourself wanting to belong so badly to someone or something that you can only imagine the past as your future.

Back in Portland, I got a cab from the bus station to the West End. As my driver dropped me in front of my door, he said, "Welcome home." There was a part of me that wanted to respond, "This isn’t really my home." But then I remembered that as my bus meandered up the West Side of NYC and through my old neighborhood, New York on the phone with me while I said goodbye, that I felt pretty sure that that also was not my home.

The truth is that an ex-love — city or man — might be better as an ex than as a present. Sometimes I think I never loved New York then the way I love it then, now. But, as Ryan Adams sang to me while we waited in the smog-filled traffic on 95, "Love won’t play any games with me, anymore/ If you don’t want 'em too/ So we better shake this old thing out the door/ I’ll always be thinkin’ of you . . . Hell, I still love you New York."

Caitlin Shetterly is a writer living in Portland. Stories, thoughts, and comments may be sent to her at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com