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We forget that cities can just as easily serve as distractions, the same as lovers can, to the gaps we can’t or won’t fill on our own. We can idealize their best sides and barricade our resentment for the ugly parts. And the cities we inhabit are never whole for us, are incapable of giving us all we want or need or believe we deserve, but still we try. We come into them as transplants, slates wiped clear of dust, ready to start new. We think the city can build us again, newer and better, just as we watch it do to itself, day after day. We want to get at its deepest parts, the hidden ones it does not share with everyone. But resentments build and nagging tics plant invasive roots. Never able to gauge whose anxieties are whose, or which ones trip our feet with a paranoid insecurity, it becomes something futile and war-like, engaging with a silent enemy that only spits back its bad habits in venomous jest.
The romance is this: move through these cities, use them, build breathless expectations and change our hair or clothes for them, parade them, admire and hate them, try to be more like them, strive to be opposite from them, cry in front of them, stay up until sunrise with them. They are the definitive and bold-print turning points that lead into some higher understanding of the world. We are suckers for their gridlines and grime and their smells of soiled streets, for the things they promise, even though we know they’ve promised the exact same to everyone who came before us. Afterward, they are nothing more than those we take in bodily form, love, lose, scorn, and probably one day love again. So then, nothing less either, I’m sure.

Notes From a Transplant on Loving and Living With the Cities We Come To « Thought Catalog

Source: thoughtcatalog.com

Why hello there. How are you today?

all i have eaten is four cinnamon buns and a half a bag of tostitos. i’ve been worse, i guess.

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I realize it’s only 7 PM but can you make up a bedtime story for future-me?

once upon a time, in the dark winter months, you wake up in the terrible dead dark hours of the morning between 4 and 6 am and trudge around your house barely conscious trying to shower and make toast and tea and find the least wrinkled pair of pants. finally you are about to be late for the train but you check your email just in case and your boss has written to say that she’s not going to come to the office because of the projected 10-50,000 inches of snow, and so if you want to work from home, you should. there is another email from her a half hour later that says one of her many cars is working less than optimally and so she is going to spend the day at the dealership buying a new BMW or something, and so you will have to work on your own for the rest of the day. you briefly don’t resent your boss for making five times more than you.

you go back to sleep until noon when the doorbell rings and a girl with a cute nose in earmuffs says she really wants to build a snow fort but no one else wants to help, are you busy this afternoon? you build a snowfort in your front yard with turrets and a secret entrance and a full kitchen and a moat which you didn’t even know you could make with snow forts. when you are both tired out you stick a flag in the top with both your names so no one can take it and go to her house, where she takes her pants off and makes you grilled cheese. in the morning your boss calls and asks why you didn’t do any work and you tell her you are quitting to pursue your dream of being a professional snow fort architect.

good night, sweet dreams, i love you

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