The door to my apartment was left ajar. And my life has never been the same.

The door to my Hell’s Kitchen studio cracked open just a few months more than 32 years ago. And my life has never been the same. It’s a long story.

It was a summer’s night. My then boyfriend Howard and I had gone out for Mexican food as we liked to do. We had our favorite place just around the corner from my studio on West 56th St., Jose Sent Me. It was a small dark restaurant that specialized in quart-size frozen margueritas — the kind that went down so easy that before you finished one you had to order another. It was the place where only months earlier we had decided to make our 4.5-year friendship a “thing.” Not the type of friends-with-benefits kind of thing. Something deeper and enduring.

We had called ourselves friends for the last four or so years. But we weren’t the kind of friends who called each other for a casual chat or confidence. For four or so years, we spent most weekends together in the summer, fleeing our hot city apartments for a rental house in the Catskills mountains.

We were the only two single people in a house of couples. We slept in two single beds in a spare bedroom. We sang together, BBQed together, and often rode shotgun in the backseat of a car. We floated down the Delaware together in large blow-up rafts, eagles soaring above us. Judy and Lenny and Cindy and Andy all thought there was something between us. Or at least there should have been. We were sympatico. He played the guitar, I liked to sing. We grew up in similar types of families and neighborhoods — he in Boston, me in Philly. We liked the same kind of movies and books. We could have been a couple. But we were not.

One weekend, when Howard was not there, I brought up my boyfriend at the time, David, for a visit to the summer house. He got the thumbs down from my housemates when he insisted on commandeering the weekend activities. He hadn’t earned that right. Another weekend, we met Howard’s Darcy. She got the thumbs down too. She was pretty and smart but was strung a little too tight. Darcy was not me, and David was not Howard.

At summer’s end and throughout the rest of the year, for four years, we would get together, the couples, Howard and I, for a movie or a dinner or a hike in the woods. But never did Howard and I meet separately. I didn’t call him, and he didn’t call me. It’s not that I didn’t want to. I felt something more than friendship on those lazy raft days floating down the Delaware. But I was not sure Howard felt the same. And I had my boyfriends, my deeply flawed, not- for-keeps kind of boyfriends.

There was Larry — a wannabe rock star who was Indiana “nice” — who conveniently lived in my building. He liked me just fine but not enough to stop serial-dating the other 20-somethings in my building.

Remember David? He lived in Philly and would come up for weekend visits. And he liked my big blue eyes. But he also liked young girls 10 years my junior.

Then there was Robert, the photographer. A people collector with stories to spare. He loved me, he said, and made a point of calling me every night for heart-to-hearts. On those calls, in the guise of transparency, he let me know that though I was special, I would never be the “one.” In the time he knew me I had gained weight. Dark-haired and a few pounds north of 110 pounds, I was not “his type.” And so while he told me he loved me on those sleepovers at his apartment, he never bothered to dump the mascara-stained Kleenex in the bathroom from whomever had stayed over the night before.

So, at the end of that fourth summer, when Howard announced that he was leaving the city for a video editing job back in his native Boston, I felt a swell of sadness wash over me. I had never told him how I felt all those summers, boating and flipping burgers on the grill and singing together. And now I would never get the chance.

Or so I thought. Howard had been gone only a few months when he started writing me letters. Not love letters. Not “I miss you” letters. No, he had written to tell me that life back in Boston in a job that placed him just blocks from his beloved Red Sox was not turning out the way he wanted. He decided then that he was moving back to New York City. He had gotten a video editing job back in the city and was coming back to look for apartments. “Could I meet him for dinner? Maybe we could go for a hike on Saturday?” “No,” he hadn’t asked Lenny and Judy, Cindy or Andy. He had just asked me.

And so it began. Hikes and dinners, movies and plays. But still no confession of long-lost love. Not even a kiss at the door. I asked my friend Maryanne and her husband Jimmy to size us up during one of those theater dates. Something was different between us, they agreed. Something was up. But what?

The “what” came to me with the Valentine’s card I received that year, signed Love, Howard. It was the first ever from him. I knew I had to respond. And so I crafted my own card on pink speckled paper festooned with hearts. I had always felt something for him, I wrote, something much more than friendship. I asked him if he felt the same. I gave him multiple-choice options to choose from: A) You’re talking science fiction, forget about it. B) I’ve never thought about it. C) I feel just the same. D) None of the above. I stuffed the envelop and mailed it.

Just two days later, my phone rang. “Yes,” he said, when I answered. “I feel the same. Let’s go out to talk about it.” We made a date to go to Jose Sent Me. Two golden frozen margaritas later, there was less to talk about. The first kiss, then the two-block trip back to my apartment, and well, the rest was history. After that, we would spend many nights together…at the Argentinean boxer dive bar down Eighth Avenue, at Angelo’s for pizza around the corner on Ninth Avenue, or during that golden fifth summer — the house in the Catskills. Only this time we didn’t go our separate ways after those long drives back to the city.

We didn’t go our separate ways the night we returned to my apartment to find the door cracked open. And that was a good thing. Because when I pushed the door in, ever so tentatively, I saw an apartment in disarray. Broken glass from the fire escape window pushed in. The gate around the window bent and open. The contents of my refrigerator thrown helter-skelter on my living room-cum-bedroom floor. Nothing had been spared — not the moldy cheese from last month’s trip to the Red Apple, not the dirty towel from the shower he or she had taken. Not the toilet that had not been flushed.

Gone was the color TV Howard had bought me. Missing, too, was the record player whose needle I had worn out playing Bonnie Raitt‘s “Rainy Day Woman” and Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” The police came, took my vitals, then left, never dusting for prints. I felt so violated, afraid to be alone.

That night, Howard told me he would stay with me. Together, we cleaned the broken glass and cleared the debris as best we could. We huddled together under the covers. And in the wee hours of the morning, he rose, making his way to the subway back to his Little Neck, Queens, apartment, where he would pick up his car, find an open hardware store, drive back to my apartment in the city, and fix the broken pieces my intruder had left behind.

I was not in the apartment to see all of this. I had gone to work, not wanting to spend one more minute alone in the apartment. I came back at day’s end, turning the new key my super had given me to unlock the door. I cracked the door ever so slightly. The apartment had been cleared and cleaned spotless. The window was covered with wood. And in the center of the room, on the table where Howard and I had shared some 55 meals together was a vase filled with red roses with a note: When things seem disheveled and in disrepair, just know that you are loved.

Several weeks later, when my dear friend Keith’s boyfriend was laying in an AIDS ward dying and his mother June needed a place to stay, I gave her my apartment and moved in with Howard. I never moved back.

Months later, on a cold, crisp December night, on my birthday, Howard asked me to marry him. And, I said, “yes, yes, I would.”

I did not think I would ever find love those years on 56th St. I had looked but could not find someone who found me just enough.

But then someone entered my apartment unannounced and left a mess. More than 32 years ago, the door to my Hell’s Kitchen studio cracked open just ajar. And my life has never been the same.