City Love

I close my eyes and dream of lights. 

A fortuneteller once told me I would live in London and Tokyo. I was seventeen, at my senior prom, and had never lived in a city or lived abroad. How unlikely, I thought.

I close my eyes and walk in a city.

I’m in New York for the first time and I can’t look fast enough. Sensory overload hums through my veins in a blur of colors, noises, images, sounds, and something in me accepts the challenge. I can’t stop smiling. I’m so alive. The noise of this City is changing into an electric song that hums and thrums in my veins, something provocative and provoking and foreign. 

“I’m a New York girl,” I said to a friend after visiting Boston. “I think it’s because I know I could get too comfortable in Boston. I could get complacent in Boston. New York will never let me be complacent. I may never be perfectly comfortable in New York, there’s always going to be something new and different and challenging and hard, and I need that. I love that. I work best like that.” 

I close my eyes and am riding the train.

How many hours did I spend staring out the windows of a bus or a train my exchange year? It made me love bus stations ad train stations and airports. The coming and going, the anticipation of reunions with people you love and the sorrow of having to say goodbye. We are so very human in these places, all going different places, on separate paths, but sit together and our worlds intersect for that plane, train, or bus ride. I memorized the way the dust settled on bus windows, the graffiti on the train.

I can still recite the S21 line into Hamburg in my head. If I started at Aumühle, I’d pass Wohltorf, Reinbek, then Bergedorf; “Allermöhe, Mittlerer Landweg, Billwerder-Moorfleet”, Rothensburgsort, Berliner Tor,” the tinny voice would announce over the loudspeaker, and then it was the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station into the second largest city in Germany. And I was back home. I knew that train station like the back of my hand. One night, a large group of my friends and I were out at a club in December, and were freezing, so we rode one of the trains to the end of the line and back, just to warm up. We stood on the platform, laughing and joking in German, just teenagers out on the weekend. I knew my favorite clubs, bummed cigarettes off guys in exchange for five minutes conversation and the lighter I always had in my pocket, learned how to hold my liquor there. But I never forgot how small I was in that city, nor how much I loved it, with its expanse of water and swans gliding proudly around the Inneralster, or the way the sun glinted off the green copper roofs that pronounced Hamburg’s prosperity, and I was proud to be part of the Hansestadt Hamburg, to carry a piece of it with me in my heart. 

I close my eyes and I am gone.

I’m not sure where I am, but I’m speaking a different language, the sun is shining, I’m surrounded by strangers on my way to meet friends, and I can’t stop smiling.. I’m a tiny cell in the beating heart of a city. I’m rubbing shoulders with people I’ve never met and fighting my way up to the front of a bar for one more round, I’m having an animated discussion over the local fare, I’m studying a map. I’m frustrated, confused, and lost, I don’t understand a goddamn word anyone is saying, I am on my own here. 

But I am on my own here. It’s up to me to work it out. It*s up to me to be the person I want to be in this new place that doesn’t give a single damn about the woman I used to be before I came, with hands outstretched and wide, eager eyes. I will learn the language, I will ask for help, I will carry dictionaries and maps and goodwill in my hands, and I’ll remember that a simple smile goes a long way.

And everything will be okay. 

I close my eyes and I’ve found a city love.