Old City Blues

Sometimes you never know how much you’ll miss a city until your gone. That is what I told myself years after I moved a second time away from my birth city. When I was only a young one, my family uprooted from Ohio to Mississippi, where I spent my middle school years. At that time, the only thing I missed about the city was an old friend who I went to private school with. We were two peas in a pod, but after the move, life happened, and the letters stopped coming and being sent. I've still yet to connect with such an old friend, but maybe in another life, we will be bike riders together. Ah, I digress.

The second time around, I moved for a job. This move was abrupt. I enjoyed the moments of walking through downtown trying to remember certain streets or taking strolls through the large city park where I played as a child. But then reality set in and I woke up as an adult. I had to work, pay bills and do all the adult things everyone else does. I slowly forget the nostalgia that came with moving back to my birth city. As the months dragged on, I slowly began to ask myself why I moved back in the first place. It was cold, like really cold. Snow on the streets for days, causing brown slosh when you walked in and out of the house. The streets were full of traffic, like any other city, where you'd wait till rush hour subsided then get to where you were going, and the night life was extinct for I was a parent with child in tow. Soon, I craved to disappear again to a place far away where snow and ice was only for a day or two. So that year, I packed up our things and found our way to where I am today. The thing about leaving a place is that sometimes you find you'll miss it. You will miss the snow, you'll miss the short traffic, you'll miss the corner stores, you'll miss the smaller city only after you've left and found another city to gripe and fuss about. That is the truth about anything you have loved and lost as well. If you played an instrument as a child and loved the time you spent on that instrument, but one day you began to do and love something else, you might miss the instrument. But even though you miss it, you also may not pick it up again because you remember how hard it was to learn how to play it or how long it took for you to understand the notes.

When it comes to me going down memory lane, it could just be that I like to travel from one place to the next and that in this stage of my life, I’m more stable. Or that I really just miss the zero degree weather and snow to match. Or it may be the food at Red Robin. The food is similar to places here, but distinctly different. The possibilities are endless. One thing is certain, I do miss the old city and will probably find time in my life to visit when the world seems a little more calm and little less hectic. But for now, I’ll continue to write about my old “city flame” and think about the next new thing that I’ll miss very soon.

Have you ever lived in a city you that you did not care to live in while you were there, but now that your gone, you miss it?

Thanks for supporting my writing journey. And I’ll see you in the next rant.