It was early August and it had begun to grow dark as I stood on the elevated platform of Avenue U, set in what some consider the backwater of Brooklyn, but which a great many who are not editors or television writers, much less mutual fund managers, do not. It had now been several months since I broke my left arm, and broke it badly, trying to run on the icy, unfamiliar streets of my new neighborhood in the early morning hours. Now, returning from another session of physical therapy, I stared at the scene around me: The people waiting for the Northbound Q as I was. The express train whizzing by. Those standing on the Southbound platform across the way. And at that moment, all at once, I had a feeling of being lost. Lost in the place where I’ve spent most of my adult life. Lost in Brooklyn.

In that moment I tried to retrace everything that had happened since the late fall of 2010, when I finally made that call. This was in the galley kitchen of the house I had bought in Washington, D.C. — a place I had grown to loathe almost since the very day I left New York, believing I’d never return. By now though, the job I had moved there for was long gone, as was the one that had followed. My mother was dead. My fiancée had given back her ring — with good reason. And now I stood in the row house, silent, the Thanksgiving holiday fast approaching. An hour before I’d returned from a weekend visit with friends back in New York, where one of whom, sensing my despair, asked me if I could live anywhere in the world, where would it be. I told her without hesitation, “Brooklyn.” And now a day and a bus ride later, I made the decision to make good on that statement. I would find my way back to the city, and in turn, to myself.

Of course, such a return is less often talked about and is increasingly rare. Since I came back in 2011, more writers than I can name — taking their cue from Joan Didion’s seminal essay “Goodbye to All That” — have written about their decision to leave the city, deluging us with commentary about how this is no longer the place they once came to, about how it was time to move on to Portland or Austin or the small towns they came from, about how the soul of the city had seeped into places unknown. They’ve written about the expensive rents and the need to escape from the spread of bank branches and pharmacy chains, about the closures of places they once loved. They talk about how the influx of foreign money has driven out what remained of the middle class. They write about leaving as Didion once did, as she put her youth and the rot of New York behind her for the Coast. What they fail to mention though, is that Joan Didion herself, the woman whom everyone cites in their departure, eventually came back.

Much of what they talk about is true. And moreover, I don’t blame them for wanting to leave and express why they’re doing so. In 2007, I too had grown tired of the city, even though it hadn’t yet undergone the unseemly changes that continue to take place. But it was in the same spirit and with no reservations that I left Brooklyn and sold my apartment in Park Slope and took on a new city and a new job. That last night before leaving, I too re-read “Goodbye to All That,” believing then that “it was distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair.”

What I didn’t understand at that moment was how much I would actually miss the fair. Or rather how much I would miss a place that had taken me in, provided me shelter, and had given me everything — heartbreak and peace, professional triumph and angst, a cadre of friends on whom I could always lean. I failed to understand how much the city had changed me, how it had given me something in which I could emotionally invest. By the end of my time here, I cared, really cared about the politics of the mayoral office and city hall, and most of my friends did too. In my flight, I failed to understand the investment one has in a place he loves — in the mass transit system and public libraries, in the conditions of the public schools. Nor did I understand however much I tried to recreate my life in another venue, at least at that moment, I would always fail.

Not that I didn’t try. Long after the reason for coming to D.C. had passed, I stayed on. I wanted to make things work. I golfed and gardened, made wonderful friends whom I miss. I found my own set of restaurants and bars; saw bands at the Black Cat. I did, in other words, try to make peace with my decision, to reconcile leaving the only place I every really loved.

But by that November evening, I was willing to give up the game. And within months I had hired movers, found an apartment in Brooklyn, and made my good-byes. In truth, I had hoped to come back to Park Slope — the place I’d first arrived when I was 25 and a young reporter at Time Inc.; where I’d once bought a home in the months before 9/11 from friends who decided they’d had enough before making their move to Austin. Instead I landed in Carroll Gardens, where it seemed everyone I’d ever known had migrated to since I had left. I told myself I would stay in that not-so-small apartment until I was ready to buy a place of my choosing, somewhere I would never leave, my lesson learned.

That’s because in April 2011 things had changed, though not by much. There were of course newborn children and talks about daycare and pickups, about Pre-K and diminished freelance rates. And gone forever were the late nights. Elaine Kauffman was dead. Siberia closed. The book parties at the Explorer’s Club now something of myth. And the city was still working its way out of the Great Recession. A giant pit on Court Street meant to house a block of condos stood as a monument to hubris and failed ambition.

Those around me had grown up — far more than myself. Yet there were still dinners at friend’s apartments and impromptu drinks in Manhattan, plays in their early stages downtown before making their debut on Broadway. Moreover, we were all still together, still held together, however tenuous the knot, by the understanding that Brooklyn — the borough most of us had moved to without any thought of ever having a home number beginning with 212 — would be the place we’d play out our adult lives.

At least that’s how it felt. I can remember now my second day back, sitting on the sidewalk on a chilly April afternoon at a bar on Court Street, having a beer. It had begun to grow cold and instead of going inside, I instead walked to the store next door and bought a sweater. Afterword I remarked to my friend how this was the only place where such an act was plausible, because it actually was.

That I am talking here about Brooklyn — specifically Brownstone Brooklyn — speaks to the time and place of my first entry. While others have looked longingly to the Burning Bronx, to the grit of the 1970s and 1980s, in truth that was never mine, or any of my friends’ New York. We were the generation for whom Manhattan, already overpriced for young reporters and writers and artists, was never a possible place to live. Moreover we’d come to the city in the latter part of the Giuliani years in which the subways were cleansed, the windows mended, the homeless suddenly out of sight. There were still magazine and newspaper jobs, people willing to pay for content. At any moment we might spot an author we admired having coffee, a midlevel actor standing over oranges at the grocery store. This was our normal.

I loved it. I had emerged from the perennial hibernation of Chicago into a place where people ate out year round, where, on any given evening, I might find myself making a phone call at 5:30 on a Friday and an hour later be surrounded by what seemed an endless supply of friends. There were Sunday night gatherings to watch The Sopranos, and afternoons drinking Pabst, and a belief that we’d all move forward together and stay together, never believing that this was merely a way station to another life.

I’m not sure if there’s an exact moment when I could see Brooklyn turning on me, or rather my belief in what it should be. Perhaps it was the first time I saw the construction begin on the pit on Court or when I learned my best friend from college who worked in finance and had never lived in Brooklyn was looking to buy here. At one moment a bar with the best jukebox in the borough was shuttered. At the next there was a Lululemon outpost on Smith Street. Every block seemed to have a CVS next to a Rite Aid next to a Duane Reade. While vast sums of money from abroad had flooded Manhattan, leaving deserted, darkened stretches of a once bustling, crowded place, our Fourth Avenue was suddenly dotted with hulking high rise condominiums — bulging, desperate testaments to what the city’s become.

Even before my first departure, I’d grown accustomed to people leaving. Now I watched, and continued to watch, the people who decided to stay behind struggle, in any manner they could, to attempt to buy apartments only to find themselves shutout by people who could come to an open house, cash and contractor in hand. For a great deal of those first years here, I wrote on the city’s powerful elite in Manhattan, always existing on the periphery of a world I knew I would never be part of, nor for that matter, want to. Never could I imagine, feeling that way about the place I actually lived.

The future never really belongs to us. New York will always dictate where we work and live, who will be allowed to stay. And perhaps the belief that my friends and I would never live more than three blocks from one another, watch our children race up and down each other’s hallways, have those last-minute gatherings in Prospect Park go on forever is a reflection on the glimmering belief one has in their youth.

But we had models for this. The idea of the cultured middle-class life was all around us. One could walk down the street and see those who’d come to the city as young men and women, who’d begun their careers in print and managed to stay in it. Some would speak of the golden handcuffs, of places they might want to leave but just couldn’t. Little did anyone know that as the years passed, people would be left begging to remain within those same constraints as long as they could.

Now, whatever remained of the life I thought I was coming back to is gone. The dinner parties have grown less frequent. People make plans weeks in advance, if at all. My two great mentors each died of cancer almost within a year of one another, neither reaching their 60th year on Earth. The worrisome drumbeat about the future of journalism has grown to a piercing pitch. A great uncertainty about what comes next hangs above us all.

With all of this, that initial glimmer about coming back, of saying Hello to All That, exists as a faded memory. I’ve become far darker in my outlook — both on my own future and that of the city. Perhaps this is the natural consequence of growing up, of the failure in trying to recapture something that could never truly be reclaimed because that great optimistic outlook belongs to those who never knew there was a time when single people lived in the Slope, when you could manage without a roommate, when a sense of permanency seemed very real. Perhaps I was trying to steal something from the very young.

When I decided, far too late, that it was time for me to buy (yes, I come from some, but not great, privilege), the neighborhoods and buildings I once thought I could land in were far, far out of reach. And now, just walking through the streets I once knew, making my way amongst the moneyed class is enough to send me spiraling to dark places, leaving me looking up from a place filled with nostalgia and regret. The thoughts of truly going back to Southwest Ohio where I was born and raised are ever-present. And as the days move forward I’ve begun to ask myself if this is what I really wanted to come back to.

I now live in a massive post-war building in a neighborhood I’d never even heard of when I came back North. Far from the low-lying, attached Brownstones, the streets surrounding me are lined with the expansive Victorian homes (one of which was recently bought by the actress Michelle Williams) for which Ditmas Park is known. It is a fine, diverse neighborhood, long occupied by its own set of slightly older artists and writers who came here long ago and have never left.

But I am among the newcomers who’ve come here now, ex-pats from inner Brooklyn, displaced refugees from Fort Greene and Cobble Hill and Park Slope. And whenever I meet a new face, the same exchange takes place. I’m asked where did I move from? Do I miss it? I’m finally told it will take some time to get used to, perhaps about a year. Needless to say, the sudden presence of people like me hasn’t gone unnoticed by those in the neighborhood whose families have been here for years and who most probably view our moving trucks with the same disregard we did when the hedge fund managers moved into our versions of Brooklyn.

Those who live elsewhere have asked me why I stay. And as Didion wrote, I have “no adequate answer to that.” All I can say is that at some point New York changed me, made me better — as a writer and a man, and being here connects me to whatever made that happen. It defined my sensibility of the world, gave me an identity that I desperately fear losing should I leave again.

“Remember a few years back, when that cat got stuck inside a wall in a West Village store?” Jason Gay wrote in The Wall Street Journal during the height of Jeremy Lin’s improbable, short-lived stint as the Knicks’ superstar. “Cats get stuck in walls all the time, but this one became an enormous deal; its rescue was covered round the clock, a media sensation. The lesson, of course, was simple: If you’re a cat and you plan to get stuck in a wall, do it in New York.”

I’m not terribly sure that’s entirely true anymore. And despite the fact that New York has changed, I have too. But maybe something of Gay’s sentiment remains, and perhaps it’s best that I’ve suddenly landed in new surroundings, physically unrecognizable, but still tinged with that feeling, forever present, of a place that you’re forever desperate to be part of, no matter the cost. I tell myself, almost daily, that this might be the best place to get stuck in the wall.

I find myself increasingly alone in that opinion. Not long ago, I had a drink with an old friend from those very first days of my first life in Brooklyn, someone I in fact met over lunch just an hour after I found my first apartment here. Now she had told me she was leaving, heading back to the Coast for valid reasons: a wariness of life in the city, a real need to be closer to her family, a sense that she had done her time and that was enough.

Afterwards, I boarded the B103 bus from the 4th Avenue Station in Park Slope and I actually took off my headphones. As I had done waiting for the train on Avenue U, I looked all around me, at my fellow passengers, at the streets alive with activity in the summer heat. This was my world now. My Brooklyn. My New York. By now I’d taken this route dozens of times. I knew where the stop was. And I knew my way back home.