My first thought upon seeing the city at night is that outer space must not exist here. I am thirteen years old, staring at the sky from the balcony of my Holiday Inn hotel room. In a month, I will start the eighth grade. Of course, I know the arrangement of the solar system. I tacked the constellation Draco to the popcorn ceiling in my bedroom with two packs of glow in the dark stars. No matter where in the world I am, I know that the Milky Way will always exist above me. Still, a tiny part of me, the romantic in me, wants to believe that if impossibilities can occur, if the entire galaxy can exist above every worldly space save one city, it would be New York.

Our room is on the fifth floor, looking out over a dumpster backed against another hotel. I have to climb across my parents’ bed to get to the bathroom at night. If they ever feel me crawling over their legs at one in the morning to pee, they don’t act like it.

I picked the bed closest to the window. I don’t care what view I have because no matter what, I know that view is still a part of New York. Beyond that brick wall is New York. Right now, I am young enough and new enough to the city that I can still romanticize it. She is still, to me, perfect. Like a new lover, New York has not yet jaded me. Right now, she is still everything I have ever wanted.

For just a moment, I let her be everything I have ever wanted. Because even from just the gloss of a torn-out magazine page, the city lights have blinded me for years. Now that I can look out at them in person, I cannot imagine ever seeing again. When the cab my father hails the next morning takes us to Times Square, I instead begin to wonder if I ever really saw before this moment, right now.

I don’t return for three and a half years.

The story still starts off the same way: I fly into LaGuardia with my family and take a cab to our hotel. But the rest of the story has changed: This time, I am not looking out over garbage; this time I am in a penthouse in the Plaza Hotel. I think, This is what the movies are all about. This is the New York of Netflix binges and ‘90s romantic comedies. Magazine ads. Dreams I used to have when I didn’t know for sure if New York was a real place.

I can see Central Park from the rooftop balcony. Currently, high tea is being held downstairs for old women in dress jackets and grandchildren preparing for cotillion graduation. Maybe everything should seem brighter to me this visit; maybe the city should seem to sparkle more because in the movies, here, it does sparkle more. But I have been here before, have walked these streets before. I am no longer wonderstruck by New York—I still love her, but not in the same way. Like an old lover, the city has shown me her flaws and I still want to stay.

I remember the Holiday Inn that welcomed me here and the feeling of stepping into Times Square for the first time. In so many ways, this is not the same city I brushed lips with when I was thirteen. I am not the same girl I was when I was thirteen. Now, I am almost seventeen. I drive myself to school every day and take medication for a depression which weighs me down like an entire jewelry set made of lead. This visit, I tour a college in the city for the first time. To get there, I take a cab over a bridge I have never crossed before into a borough I have never entered before. It does not take me long to decide that Brooklyn is beautiful. Maybe I can start over here, in this New York.

Starting over here would be nice. There’s still so much I haven’t yet experienced. Possibly all of it, I haven’t yet experienced. Not this me. Not with this city. On my way back to the airport, I stuff leaflets from the college I toured in my carry on like trying to hide an engagement ring until precisely the perfect moment.

I think I’ll fall in love with this city. Not with my idea of her, what I imagined her to be for so many years when I would stare at the five-dollar Walmart posters hanging on my bedroom walls, but with what she really is. A cluster of so many storefronts that I end up eating at the same three restaurants every week, because looking for anything different feels like trying to separate grains of sand at the beach. Blisters on the tops of my feet because Birkenstocks were not made to walk five miles every day, but cabs are expensive and the metro system is confusing and how was I supposed to know I would get lost in SoHo.

This city is not the absence of an entire galaxy or the solar system. She is the crowd that forces me to share my two-chair table at Starbucks with a complete stranger, turning cars that almost forget pedestrians’ right of way, a brick wall with nothing beyond it except more brick walls.

My first weekend as a New York City coed, I buy two overpriced packs of glow in the dark stars in the Met gift shop because a small part of me will always be just a tourist here. I tack Draco to the popcorn ceiling of my dorm room. I’ll fall in love with this city. When I throw the gift shop bag in the trash bin and cut off the lights, when I crawl into my bed to find it covered in little white popcorn bits of the ceiling, I’m not surprised to find that I already have.