19:59
I’ve started re-watching Sex and the City. As ever, there is much to unpack. This time around my focus is on Carrie's relationship with New York City. It really is a character itself. A character she often mirrors. One that she emulates, idealises and sometimes despises. There are endless scenes of the city that serve to seduce the viewer. To push and pull. To exist as a backdrop to pathetic fallacy in scenes of desperation signified by heavy rain and fog. The city becomes the protagonist that keeps you up at night fawning over the thought of them. The character that makes it easy for us see it as better than it is. We find ourselves blowing smoke up its best streets and over the roofs of its tallest buildings. The story arcs often lead you to dislike it, to find it too much, too noisy, and at times, mediocre, only to then figure out that it offered all that you had ever wanted. All that you didn’t yet know that you wanted. That it was the friend you didn’t realise was actually the love of your life. If Paris is the city of love, the place of reconciliation, a symbol of adoration, does living in the city imbue its residents with its essence? Do they taste the crushes? The lull of the inevitable ebbs of loneliness? The idea that you can take the person out of the city but not the city out of the person. A symbiotic union that won’t dare sever on its own accord.
When we think of our hometown, we know that every corner is a reminder of something or someone. The alleyway I'd walk through to get to school that backed onto an old church. The doorway I had my first kiss. The shop where I worked my first job, (in retail), it didn't last long. The book shop where I bumped into Ron Weasley's dad and impressively embarrassed myself beyond my/your/anyone's wildest dreams. Everyone has a place that knows them. That knows who we were then. Who we hoped to be. The ghosts you made yourself. It’s a place that perhaps knows so much that it sometimes feels that it might just eat most of what you are, from knuckles to knees, and leave you with nothing. There are usually parts of the city that sting, parts that exist in the shadows only we can see. For me there’s the place with the bench that faces the buoy, right by the ice cream shop, where I spent many days, legs swinging beneath me, overcome with both wonder and disillusion. The city that knows us so intimately is fine when we’re gone. It knows how to self soothe. How to move forward without us. How to close down book stores and build new cycling lanes. How to add more and more coffee shops and micropubs on the corner of every third road.
It sometimes feels as if people are their town. As if the town is them. That one doesn’t exist without the other. As if the sun ceases to exist when they leave. As if, when they return, the sun knows that they must also reappear to welcome them home, just in time. We go back to visit certain places, twice, to see if we remember it to be quite the same. To disrupt the dust. To awkwardly reunite, waiting for the other to say the first word, or the last. To be reminded of the pleasure of spending time with that character. The lingering intrigue to lift up the car bonnet and have a look around, see if it’s still safe to take on the road. Perhaps there’s catharsis in going back to a place, reliving a memory, re-writing a story. Us and our truth, sitting in silence. To overcome the “place we belong” deficit and self reckoning. Wanting to come out the other side both more connected and self-sustaining.
When we leave, we know we can’t take it with us. Much of it’s not ours to take. Someone else will have their first kiss in that same doorway, and it’ll be theirs, for now. No one teaches us, but we all seem to know this, and know that we must take what’s ours and then make another home to keep our new memories. I grew up by the sea, in a town known for its pebbled beaches and uncertain terrain. Some of my favourite childhood memories are from learning to windsurf in heavy rain, and then burning my cheeks in the sun the next day whilst learning to sail. I couldn't tell you which conditions I preferred, but they were both mine. Frank Ocean said to swim good but maybe we can just continue to swim, to move forward despite the currents of nostalgia and longing. To keep swimming, in order to swim good.
Beautiful - I was transported 💚
You deserve an award. Damn.