A place can make you happy only when you strip away the illusion that it will.

To the city that held my hopes and where I stumbled.

We’ve been tempestuous lovers, it’s true. I promised myself to you long ago, when hungry dreams hung in the already scattered cobwebs of my fresh green freedom. Cobwebs that were not supposed to be there, but they held little golden dewdrops of anticipatory salvation in you along their threads.

So I came to you saturated with years of ideals that dripped unconsciously from my soul. Ideals of effortlessly folding into ancestral arms, of finding myself in your cobbled streets, silky waterways, and the ancient dust of heritage that suffuses magic into your physicality. My European Eden. These ideals took root around me but I took a misstep, suddenly on the shadowed side of the path – only seeing an echo of their fulfilling glory, the time spent in desperate disillusionment not lifting the shade, but lengthening it beneath an eternally persistent, mocking sun. It seemed I could not outrun the shadow.

The brief delights of honeymoon were scarcely grasped, for fear of lingering expectations and fickle futures. I became numb to the ease of embrace, blind to the infinite, exhilarating reality of every moment. That this is it. In the midnight cycles pedalling against a whipping wind and a racing anxiety. In the rayed hands of the sun tapping against my dirty window, coaxing me out of my sanctuary. In the supermarket trudges and the muddy smell of canals and the glint of white underwings lit with lamplight, soaring in superimposition across a fat slab of dark cotton sky.

Within the blackened corners of your chrysalis I have been confronted with things I came here proud enough to believe I did not have to anymore. You have forced me to face the deep gritty truths of myself and though I have tried to hate you, to shout and blame and stamp you to the ground, you are too beautifully wedged in my heart. Instead, you flashed your picture perfect smile and taught me one more thing: love over fear, and without condition.

We are not done with each other, we never will be. But from this point on I hold you to nothing, and thank you for everything. It can take just one moment to step out of the shade, once you know that you can. And in this light there stands only the moment, delicately poised anew.

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