I made my way outside the cafe and stepped down the staircase. The lights, lights all around. The lights made me jump in ecstatic happiness, and I could not see my face, but I knew I was gleaming, too. No flaw was visible. What a city, I thought. Almost as if the hour, the moment was as perfect as perfect can be. Everything is redeemable on a January evening, even this brimming, overflowing hot mess of a town. For reasons I could not finish listing, this city has my heart. No one can love it as much as I love it in the way I love it. It is the nature of expressed love. We claim, “many before may have loved like this perhaps, but not truly like this, not like I love.” All people think of it this way, and all of them are filled with hubris, but some illusions are worth the risk, and some falsehoods need not be interrupted by blunt truth.
Why do I feel this, though, when not a long time ago, all I felt was disgust for it?
I believe in most lives comes a moment, and it has no age, time, or season. In it, you must learn that no part of life matters more than the whole. You must learn this in your own way, and like expressed love, this will be yours and yours alone. Once you are through the turmoil, you will be armed with wisdom readily available at the newsstand on the street. However, most things cannot enter our minds without our permission.
There is so much joy and grace in expecting nothing from anything, but most people try to twist life into shape. This seldom goes unpunished, and so, along the way, you get the ever-churned, regurgitated idea of letting things happen.
This time is different; this time, it means something; this time, you fail to shrug it off as philosophy or hullabaloo.
Something about it suddenly starts to make sense. Perhaps, some things are often repeated because they are true, but we cannot know them until we see them happen on our own. Children often learn things by doing them in their own way, stumbling to a solution. Then, something changes along the way, and then, like an unexpected storm, comes the reminder. That is what happened to me, too.
The city is but a small part of it—I have not looked at anything the same way since.