The Ones That Got Away
Can you fall in love with a city?
I wondered this, wandering deserted streets through Meguro, Ebisu, and Shibuya. Walking home. Wallowing in thought.
Girls had left me for cities. Left me for places. It’s different when it’s a person. You can’t blame a place for stealing a heart. Can’t blame it for what it offers. What it does. It’s never an active participant. Never a thief.
It’s not you, they said.
I’m in love with someplace else.
Not someone. Not somebody.
You can experience a fling with a city. That’s what travel is. Tourism. It’s a roller coaster romance — that sense of falling in love for the first time. Looking deep into eyes and feeling them look back. Passionate nights exploring new bodies. Listening to the rhythms of a different kind of breath. Sleeping in foreign beds. Embracing the exotic.
You get swept up in the fun. The desire. The infatuation. Everything is new and exciting.
It’s not too different to falling in love.
Of course, stay and settle in, and you realize you never communicated. Never really talked. Still don’t know how. All that fun, infatuation, and discovery got in the way. Dive beneath the surface, and you’ll find the things you don’t like.
But cities won’t apologize for that. Love me or leave me, they say. I don’t care. I never told you I wasn’t any of those things. You just never looked.
And perhaps we’ve all woken up to that sensation, once.
Sometimes though, a city will carve a path to your heart. It’s flippant. Unintentional. Subtle. The surface is what you expected, and beneath it, more. There’s depth and warmth. A sense of place. The streets and its people vibrate on your wavelength.
What is that? When a city speaks to you through the rumblings of its traffic and the footfalls of its people? When the food and the drink entice, and the city skyline is enough to keep you warm? What is it, when the scenery itself is a hug? When the distant sound of sirens on the wind is the whisper of a sweet nothing.
Can we call that a love letter? I feel like we should.
In my heartbreak, I was left with a pile of sharp, shattered glass. You get cut, putting that back together. You bleed. You hurt. You can’t help it. But most of us, we can’t just leave our hearts there, either.
Can’t just sweep them away.
What matters though, as you slowly piece your heart back together, is the glue you choose to do it with.
For me, it was Tokyo.
In the busy crowds, and the growing coffee culture, and the quiet welcoming of the weird, and the streets that stretched forever, was a sense that we were all of us lonely, together. I rebuilt what I’d lost. Replaced what was gone. Found stories to tell, and pictures to capture, and moments to share.
Each of them a glimpse at a different kind of romance.
A different kind of love.
In Tokyo, I found a partner. A friend. A lover.
Wandering the night-time streets, wondering and wallowing, and glancing at windows into stories and lives entirely their own, I realized that perhaps those girls had never left me for cities and places that loved them better.
Because perhaps, I’d done it first.
I just didn’t know it at the time.
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