When you first arrive in a new place, you may have some preconceived notions about it. Paris is the most romantic city in the world, or Tokyo is brimming with bowing businessmen. Or you might not know a thing about it. In both cases, the truth is really closer to the latter; the city, for all your ideas about it, or lack thereof, is an unknown quantity.
You don’t know how or how long it takes to get from Gare du Nord to Port de la Chapelle. You don’t know how much help you’ll get from kind strangers (it turns out, usually, a lot). You don’t know what it smells like on the street or just how that belfry in the market square looks when the sun rises behind it at 8 in the morning.
All these things you begin to know the second you step off the train or leave the airport. All these things, the contours of a city, are part of the landscape of your memories by the time you board the train or plane to leave.
The surprising part of it, considering your sheer ignorance of the place days or weeks before, is how loathe you are sometimes to leave. Even when you’re eager to move on, even when you’re homesick. It’s like leaving a new friend, or a new home.
On Dec. 28 of last year, in that hollow space between Christmas and New Year, Eric (of Anticompass, see right), said it best when he wrote about moving on:
… And so I continued on my way with creaking legs and an aching heart. It seems that everywhere I go I meet so many wonderful people, and each place I stay for a few days, I could stay all my life. The hardest part of traveling isn’t the riding nor the uncertainty of where I shall sleep or what I shall eat. It is the certainty that leaving will break my heart and will be an abandonment of home.
That’s a lovely piece of writing. I have travelled a lot, and it’s nice to have the feeling so eliquently put.
Thank you for that.