This isn’t a long story.

In 1984, when I was 26, I met a young woman on a Manhattan sidewalk and we immediately fell in love. She was 22, tall, blond and muscular, a poet. I bought her cigarettes and lunch because she didn’t have a dime. I kissed her for the first time a few hours later on a cross-town street. I’d never felt this way before.

Soon, I was waking up regularly in her apartment in Chelsea. We’d grab breakfast at the Whore and Pimp Donut Shop, an ancient place on West 23rd Street. There were trays of glazed donuts and cornbread in the window, and a one-eyed Greek waiter spoke filthy Spanish to an ever-shifting display of misfits eating eggs and bacon on paper plates and sipping coffee from cone-shaped disposable cups. We loved it.

One morning a year after we met I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk in front of the Whore and Pimp Donut Shop and looked up into her eyes. She had a big nervous smile on her face. She thought I was losing it.

“Will you marry me?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Just then the neon flashing Donuts, Donuts, Donuts caught my eye and a truth hit me like a rock-filled sock to the head: when the Whore and Pimp Donut Shop closes, our marriage will be over. Over the years, I’d learned to trust my intuition.

Still, we got married, and we stayed in that neighborhood forever. We moved into a big house. We wrote. We traveled. We ate Chinese food in front of the TV on Sunday nights. We became fluent in Spanish. We sat in our darkened living room and watched addicts light their crack pipes on the stoop across the street during the great epidemic.

Gradually, the neighborhood changed its focus from crack to real estate. Our values rose. We had three kids. We quit speaking. We became a couple that coordinated its appointments with the marriage counselor via email. I passed the donut shop nearly every morning, gauging my mortality by the smile lines that appeared on the one-eyed Greek’s face.

Suddenly, 20 years had passed and I realized I hadn’t seen the Greek in over a week. Someone else was manning the cash register. I looked for him every day. No sign. I told my wife. She didn’t seem to care. I feared the worst. And then it happened.

I came up out of the subway into the bright sun to see that dead air filled the space where transvestites once blew smoke rings. The Whore and Pimp Donut Shop was closed. Next to the cash register, stacks of paper cups waited to be filled with “coffee, regular, to go.”

No more donuts were going to come out of that fryer.

It was a warm February afternoon. I led my wife over to the dining room window and showed her that the witch hazel in the garden was blooming tiny yellow flowers weeks ahead of schedule.

“Spring’s coming,” she said.

“A false spring,” I replied.

A dirty look ran across her face and went into hiding.

“Typical,” she said. “Typical of you.”

It was getting so we couldn’t even agree on the seasons. She went out to do some shopping. I stayed home.

The next day I drove out to the Hamptons to work on an assignment for The New York Times about the joys of living in an upscale beach community.

I rode along the oceanfront roads of Sagaponack with a realtor, looking at mansions for sale. One oddly designed modernist castle on an estuary, priced at $8.2 million, was being offered as a “tear down.”

“It’s a remarkably good deal, considering what vacant lots go for around here,” said the realtor.

There was a large, dead fish on the lawn near the waterfront, its eye sockets vacant.

“How’d that fish get there?” I asked her.

“An unusual surge tide,” she said.

I turned it over with my foot. Bugs crawled from its belly. When life gives you dead fish, make...what? Fishonade?

“People are wanting to get close to nature post-9/11,” the realtor said. “This house is going to sell quickly.”

I envied the realtor’s optimism.

“I think my wife wants to leave me,” I muttered.

The realtor didn’t miss a beat.

“See it as an opportunity,” she said.