What I really meant was,

Did you expect for anything to change? Did you think that New York would have missed your presence, somehow slipped by and leaped ahead, marked twelve notches and grown buildings ahead of you? When you came back and stood in the subway for the first time again, did your eyes catch on new ads, older ones that you remembered, tried to discern some kind of elusive atmospheric subtlety in crowd movements, perhaps more caution in the wind, or a different protocol operating inside handshakes, holding-the-door-opens, street crossings?

Or did you stay and expect things to stay the same and for you to have grown just a smaller amount, stepped out of gates, pulled bloated bags between doors and stepped out onto high skies but narrower streets, lower buildings, the water towers and doormen operating in parallel constants while you had left and you were gone -- and you, having come back, being taller and firmer inside? The rest being smaller and less formidable this time?

Was there any of that? Movement and having left or having stayed and the change thereof and the brooding thoughts upon a slipperiness instigated by a geographical change, time lost, lost, left, a return but not a regain... these kinds of things?

But no. Look, there, trains shooting overhead on arches harboring invisible arrows upon undrawn free-body diagrams -- a bridge -- in transit moving between action and reaction, reconciling staying and leaving, push and give. On top of that train cars move sideways, a lateral escape from the crush of gravity and the push of terrae and bridge. The three of us walk uptown regardlessly.