Why would you leave New York?

When I left New York, I think that few of my friends understood my reasons.
To tell the truth... I am only beginning to understand myself.
My last 10 years there were so filled with activity, that I have to cut hunks of it up in my memory and slow it down to really see what happened. Don't get me wrong I loved the pace, the urgency of it all! Even if it was just an illusion... a figment of a collective imagining.
I do love that city! Sometimes I'd go out late at night and just walk.
Uptown, downtown, cross-town it didn't matter, I just wanted to be on the streets.
They were my streets.
Just before I left in the early 90's, I lived in a rather large apartment on 40th & 6th with my brother and his husband.
The three of us did not have a bad life, enough room to be out of each other’s hair & Bryant Park and the city at our doorstep.
If I could have only frozen that time, no... not out of a sense of nostalgia, or even because it was my "Golden time". No...simply cause we were all alive then.
Because it was before that Plague touched us.
Before the color started to drain out of our daily existence.
Now my brother and I live on opposite sides of the globe neither in NYC.
We don’t speak about our 'other' or the city, but sometime we speak of love...and then we know...we can only be visitors there now.
Why would you leave New York?
Well... Why wouldn't we?