To the City I Haven’t Found Yet
to a place that has never heard my name
I think about you more often than I should.
I don’t know your streets.
I don’t know what your mornings smell like or how your buildings look after rain.
Maybe you are somewhere cold.
Maybe there is a small apartment with a window facing a street I have never walked.
I imagine arriving with very little.
A suitcase.
A few books.
Clothes that no one there has seen me wear before.
And a name that belongs only to me.
I wonder what it would feel like to buy coffee from someone who knows nothing about my past.
To become a regular somewhere without anyone knowing who I used to be.
To make friends who meet me as I am, rather than as the person I learned to be around everyone else.
Maybe I would speak more there.
Maybe I would finally learn how to tell people what I like without first deciding whether it is safe.
Maybe I would invite someone to walk with me after dark.
Maybe one evening the sky would turn cloudy, the wind would grow strong, and rain would begin tapping against the windows.
There would be a full moon somewhere behind the clouds.
And instead of watching it alone, I would turn to someone beside me and say,
look.
That is all.
No explanation.
No story about why nights like this mean so much to me.
Just someone looking at the same sky.
I don’t know if you exist, city.
Maybe you are not even a place.
Maybe you are simply the life I imagine when I need to remember that there may still be rooms in this world where I can breathe differently.
But if I ever find you,
I hope you do not give me a new identity.
I hope you give me enough quiet to finally keep my own.
