Growing up was like the fall,
slow, racing up to something frantic.
I knew the cold was coming,
I did not know how bad it would be. 

I find myself in front of 264 Lexington Ave, the apartment building I lived in from birth to two weeks before my thirteenth birthday. The bare trees out front, planted in my 10th year, frame my vision. Their spiky limbs reach the second floor, casting a slight shadow over the sidewalk. A pre-war structure, designs of Medusa cover the windows, and bricks form the walls. A door tag left by a shipping company on the front door moves in the wind. I made countless memories on the pavement beneath my feet and, a step further, countless more. 

I want to believe that nothing has changed. My youngest years should remain intact, solid inside the worn-oak door. If I could step inside, I would get Pillow Pets for my birthdays and watch Supergirl on Saturday mornings. But change is the leaves that turn orange and fall to the ground every autumn. I want to run into the lobby and press the elevator's yellowed "UP" button. I could make funny faces in the gold-rimmed mirror until the elevator arrives, hop on, and ride up to the 9th floor. But something is keeping my feet glued to the pavement.

I look around, seeing if I can find a way to move to the front doors, but my shoes stay solid on the ground, impossible to lift. Taking my eyes away, I notice the people walking past me. All dressed in gray business suits and fashioned with beige 90s-era telephones, an air of synchronicity and repetition defines their movements. Step after step, the suits are unrelenting in their pace. One yells into his phone and shakes his pockets for change to pay the deli next door for a newspaper. Another has the phone at her side, tapping her heels against the sidewalk while she waits for the walk sign to change its red hand.

No matter how urgent the people in suits seem to be, none of them notice me. Our difference moves suddenly into the spotlight when I realize that I cannot grasp that this building, my building, has changed. The suits want change, the pocket to have coins, the light to signal its little white man. 

I suddenly fall on the pavement, my legs collapsing beneath me. I look at them in disbelief, then at the door to see if it has opened. Once dancing in the wind, the shipping tag has become perpendicular to the door, a solid sheet of paper held up by nothing. I get up to examine further, but something catches my eye. A suit waving her hand out for a cab is frozen at the edge of the sidewalk, her eyebrows furrowed in annoyance. The suit in front of the deli has his mouth open in mid-yell, arm out to grab today's paper. The heels of his feet are petrified in the air, reacting to his impatience. Everything around me has been suspended in time, daylight streaming in the suits' eyes without blinking.

I could enter the building now. My feet are my own. The suits are out of the way. All I have to do is push past the dread and nostalgia. I know all too well what I will feel if I ride up to the 9th floor and open the dark grey door to apartment 9B. How I will handle that, though, I can decide. I walk up to the door and reach for the brass doorknob, feeling its smooth metal. I push it open and take my first step inside. I am home.