On having outgrown a city
This impression is staying on my skin like ink stays on the stamp after the paper has already been stamped. It’s as if every step has already been had. Every smile has been smiled. Every breath has been breathed. Every corner has been explored. One unique place holds on so much memories that it is starting to feel crowded, like this one subway line at 6:38 at night when you come back from work. I feel this way about Lyon, the city where I grew up. In a kind of weird way that I did not notice at first, this impression became tiring. It felt like being physically attached to my past. When you see multiple memories at every corner of the street, it makes creating new memories a bit more difficult. I’ll give you an example.
This morning, I was just out for a morning run and I turned the corner of the street and saw the shadow of an ex-boyfriend arguing over some stupid thing, a man at the bus stop wanted to come to me to tell me not to cry for him, but my ex-boyfriend intercepted him and came to see me instead. I continue running, and a hundred meters later I see the stairs of the University, the ones where I once sat and wondered, should I stop doing everything that I am doing right now, or would that be wrong. I graduated two days ago and took the same stairway to go to the closing ceremony. Then I meet a friend for coffee, and even though I have never been to this coffee, while walking with him, ten different memories of our high school nearby flow into my mind and it’s almost as if I can hear them whispering into my ear. If it’s not the sudden recalling of memories, I will go to the local market and see someone I know from my gym selling tomatoes. I will even go get some hair shaved and stumble upon an old classmate in the street. It’s almost like the past is holding on to me, just like sticky autumn leaves under my sneakers in the rain, or the cheese potato purée they make Place Carnot at Christmas market every year.
And it’s like a different color has tainted all the city. Lyon looks sepia to me, it looks like the city my parents chose for me when I was a kid, it looks like the city where I had my first date, my first kiss, the park where I used to meet with friends, the taste of pizza in between school time. It didn’t happen abruptly, so I didn’t see it at first. I couldn’t have anticipated it. It’s been just like an old picture left in the sun changing so slowly but when you find it again you notice, now everything has lost its color, everything has the off smell of a dusty antique shop where old ladies’ furniture are mixed with miniature pyramids and ivory letter openers and weird trinkets you wouldn’t even imagine. It used not to be this way, of course I have loved this city. Its colors have been unique, its smell has been fresh like clean sheets and there have been first times there. Many of them. But that was some years ago.
If this city was a lover, it would only ever be a child’s first love to me, a boy I met in high school when I had no clue what love even was. We would have made great memories together, but he could never have been the love of my life.
That’s why I need to go. As for where I am going, I have to admit that I have no tangible explanation. Since the first days that I went to this city I have felt a strange pull, almost magnetic, a force. Without even knowing why, I have always felt at ease in this city. As a dear friend of mine* said. “Whatever lifts the corners of your mouth, trust that.” So that’s what I’ll do, and that’s where I’ll go.
Coco-Fraise
(*Djalāl ad-Dīn or Rumi, mystic, sufi, poet from Balkh, now Afghanistan)