They say you can’t go home again. I don’t know who “they” are, but apparently this mysterious phantom collective is well-stocked in facts, aphorisms and guidelines.

   I was going home again, to Brooklyn, though the notion of return, and what it implied, was a matter of existential semantics.

   There’s another saying: “When you leave Brooklyn, you ain’t going anywhere.”

   That has held true for me throughout the years.

   No matter where I’ve gone, where I’ve lived, Brooklyn has always been there with me—a trusty vaudeville sidekick, or mutable beast scavenging in my gut.

   Brooklyn, as a phantom city that inhabits me, is immune to erosion, and neither time nor geographical distance can part us. Which is why “they” had it wrong. You can go home again. And again, and again, and again. The journey is but a trick of light, and memory; a recursive free-fall into spools of footage. Or to put it another way: It’s the rehearsal for a show that stopped running a long time ago.