The City That Adopted Me
A place becomes home when it has quietly decided about you
It crept up on me so gradually that I cannot name the year in which this city became mine.
For a long time I lived here as a guest lives in a house he does not expect to keep.
I learned the streets the way a spy learns them, usefully, but without any .
Everything I saw, I compared to a place that was no longer there to defend itself.
The bread was wrong, the light was wrong, the very way strangers greeted one another was wrong.
I wore my disappointment like a coat, and I mistook it for to what I had lost.
Then one evening, returning late, I turned a corner and felt, without warning, that I was nearly home.
It was not a thought but a in the chest, the body arriving before the mind consented.
I stopped under a street lamp and asked myself, almost angrily, when this had happened to me.
When had the baker's face become familiar; when had I started nodding to the woman with the dog?
When had I begun to say 'we' about the people of this city, and to mean it without noticing?
A place becomes home not when you decide it has, but when it has quietly decided about you.
The city had been adopting me for years, in a slow and one-sided ceremony I had refused to attend.
It had learned my footsteps on its pavements before I was willing to learn its name for love.
I felt, standing there, a so sharp that I almost wished the feeling away.
To love this place seemed a of the other, as though the heart held only one visa.
But the heart, I have since learned, is not a country with a single hard border.
It can extend its without surrendering an inch of what it already holds.
Loving the city that took me in does not unlove the city that cast me out.
The two affections do not compete; they lodge in different chambers and rarely quarrel.
Since that evening I have let myself belong here, cautiously at first, then with something like relief.
I plant herbs on the balcony now, and I complain about the local weather like a .
Complaint, I have decided, is the surest sign that a place has finally become one's own.
One does not bother to complain about a hotel; one complains only about a home.
The old country still lives in me, and it always will, in a I keep warm and lit.
But this new city has quietly built itself a room beside it, and moved in, and stayed.
I no longer feel that I am betraying one home by admitting that I now have two.
A man can have more than one place that holds his footsteps and calls, in the dark, his name.