Letter to a Younger City

I went back last week to the city that raised me, and it did not recognize me. That is the honest way to say it. The streets were where I left them, but they had moved on without my permission.

The corner shop where I bought single cigarettes I was too young to smoke is a phone repair stall now. The cinema is a gym. The wall I once sat on for an entire summer, certain that my whole life would happen elsewhere, has been painted over twice.

I am not telling you this to complain. Cities are allowed to grow up. It only stings because I assumed — without ever quite saying it — that the place would keep a copy of me on file. That somewhere in its memory I was still seventeen and sure of nothing.

The geography of a self

We map ourselves onto places without realizing it. A street is never only a street; it is the conversation you had there, the person you were when you had it.

So to walk those streets as a stranger is to discover how much of your past was being held, all this time, by the buildings. Take the buildings away and the memory goes loose, unmoored, looking for somewhere to land.

The city was not built to remember me. I had simply mistaken being a witness for being known.

I sat on a bench that used to be a different bench and watched the new people live their ordinary afternoon. A boy ran past with a kite that wouldn’t catch. Somewhere a kettle of an argument came to a boil and then went quiet.

It was, I realized, exactly the sort of afternoon I used to ignore completely, back when I lived there and believed my real life was perpetually about to begin somewhere else.

Here is what I came home with, if you can call it that:

The city owes me nothing, and that is a mercy. It freed itself from me the moment I left, and in doing so it freed me too. I do not have to keep being seventeen on its behalf.

I can let the kite not catch. I can let the argument go quiet. I can walk the painted-over wall and feel, instead of grief, a small clean gratitude that I was ever there at all.