Relationships with cities are very much like relationships with people. Sometimes even stronger, or more formative. You fall into them feeling like a child. Everything is new and exciting, endless opportunities, everything is possible. You wake up in a rented bed, smiling not knowing what the day will bring, and you lie down at night taking a long exhale, perfectly overwhelmed by all new smells and sounds and sights and sounds. You feel like your life has restarted. You imagine yourself in this new relationship, who you could be now, who you could grow to be, the life you could live out. Shiny. Everything is shiny.
But you change and sometimes the person, or city, you’re in a relationship with does not, or just changes in a different direction, and one day you find yourself in an argument and you can’t seem to reach each other. Like suddenly you speak two different languages and nothing translates. You flail your arms, raising the white flag, not understanding where you’re being misunderstood, but off you both go and there’s a separation growing in between you. Something has changed.
I left Berlin many times between then and now. Asked for a break, needed to see if maybe there was another match for me out there. Something always felt a little off but I never managed to put my finger on it. I felt in love, but also constantly daydreaming about something else. You know those people who say you just know it’s right when you meet the right one? I guess I still want to believe in that. I guess I still want to feel that, certain, knowing this is it. I had secret affairs with Bali, with Barcelona, with Lisbon, with Prague… but I always came back. For a person, for a job, the wind brought me back, a flight… I always ended up riding a bike through Friedrichshain in July. Flip flops and cheap wine from the corner shop. And I always found my way back to moments of falling asleep smiling, thinking, “maybe I could be happy here”.
Joan Didion describes her time in New York as never really realizing she lived out a life there, like she only planned on staying for a few more months. But suddenly 8 years went by and she had lived out a life there, without meaning to. That’s how I feel about every place I’ve ever lived out a life in, I never actually meant to stay anywhere, just a few months, which sometimes turned into a bit more. I wonder what it would feel like to actually intend to stay somewhere, live out a life, make some plans.
It was somewhere on the streets of Budapest that I realized I have reached the beginning of an ending. I have started my leaving. Like that moment in a relationship when you know there is no saving. You stand empty in front of someone who used to make you feel a million feelings per second and suddenly you feel nothing at all. And even though it will take months, maybe even a year, you know the breakup started for you in that second, and one day you’ll say goodbye for the last time and it will feel heavy and free at the same time, because endings are always beginnings and they carry you forward, always to something new and different.
Where to next? Not sure, I know I’ll find it when I get there. Maybe Porto. Maybe Prague. Maybe I’ll spend a few months dancing to rhythms in Ibiza. Maybe something brand new. I always wanted to visit Canada. Maybe a few months in New York? I have no one who will miss me, nothing pulling me back. Maybe I’ll go nowhere at all, for a while. Floating somewhere in between, feeling everything, holding on to nothing.
