XXX, je t'aime. (Please insert any city where you’ve lived.)
by Iryna Vikyrchak
For some reason, we nostalgically romanticize all cities familiar to us, especially those where we have lived. It doesn’t matter if it was for a short or an extended period.
I’ve never lived in Paris, although I have lived in several other cities. But it also depends on how you interpret the term “lived.” Where is the line between living in a place and just visiting for an extended period? Hard to tell. Does it depend on the experiences we have there? Probably. Is our memory playing tricks on us, erasing all the negative emotions and keeping the good ones? Is it why we idealize the places that exist in our private past?
A very good friend of mine says that it is possible to make a responsible and conscious decision about whether you like a particular city only after you have spent all four seasons there. I have been living in Wroclaw for a year now, although it feels like I have managed to experience only one season through many months here – the endless pandemic season.
While looking for a catchy quote in this essay, I stumbled upon the following one, signed by Thomas Fuller: “Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.” It beautifully explains what our brain does to our memories – just using the refrigerator space wisely, keeping only good things inside. And all would be wonderful with this quote, except that Thomas Fuller, whom Wikipedia has an article on, lived long before refrigerators were invented. Nevertheless, I would still stick with the imaginary of the cupboard.
If my pandemic season was a piece of furniture, it would be somewhere between the cupboard of memories from the cities I have lived in and the bookcase in my apartment in Wroclaw. The books I have gathered during the lockdown were delivered to my door, picked up from the post office, from little storage boxes of the mail service; some arrived with me in the folds of my clothes in suitcases a year ago. Both the bookcase and the cupboard of memories from the cities where I have lived are incredibly precious for filling up my inner space in this emotional desert of lockdown limitations.
I think it is a very particular cupboard of dark brown wood from my grandma’s house. As a child, I spent many hours inspecting its content, and now, as a grown-up, closing my eyes right before falling asleep, I am often transferred to an endless white room between dimensions, where I stand in front of the very same cupboard again. I see it in the smallest detail – that unit my brain carefully placed in the best-preserving spot of the inner “refrigerator.” My grandma used to have the shelves overpacked with cups and glasses, larger ones in depth, and smaller ones in front in neat rows. Each cup and glass was filled with treasures – tiny fidgets, coins, buttons, tiny pieces of paper, thimbles, and hard-to-identify trifles. Like an attentive archeologist, I would dig in them carefully, standing on a tall white stool to reach the higher shelves. Now, inside my cupboard, I keep the impressions of my cities. Here is a mug tagged “Berlin”. A bowl signed as “Warsaw” next to it and another one hand-signed “Lviv” in white ink and “Chernivtsi” on a jug in the middle of the shelf. Like the most expensive bottle of wine, I slowly uncork my memories and travel there when feeling hungry with wanderlust. Because cities, the places you have lived, remain a part of you forever, they never disappear from your inner cupboard.
Re-visiting the cities where you used to live, in reality, is the most painful kind of tourism. Wherever you go, your feet will betray you sooner or later by taking the path they know, turning onto little streets they used to walk down, bringing you on the familiar yet forgotten routes. However, if time is nonlinear, the former you is walking down this street at the same time, up to the entrance, going up the stairs. The past and present are happening simultaneously in this place. It is the moment of meeting oneself in space but not in time. At present, you can’t resist the temptation of peaking into the windows of the apartment, which used to be your home, and suddenly sneaking around the building like a murderer who came back to the scene of the crime at twilight. And for a fracture of a second, it seems – it seems like you see them through the window-pain when suddenly the light goes on inside the apartment. In the past, you might be leaning over the table reading a book, watering a plant in a big pot, or feeding a goldfish in a round-lit aquarium – you recognize the kind of light. But it is just an apparition. Somebody you don’t know calls this place home now. What are they like – this somebody. Have they changed the color of the peachy walls? Do they enjoy the morning coffee while looking out of the open window like you did two or even ten years ago, enjoying the same view? Have they noticed that a bunch of magpies often flock on the roof across the street or that in October, the sun sets precisely at the end of the street, looking like a giant fireball? And why does your chest suddenly become smaller, making breathing harder?
Sometimes, I wonder what it would feel like to revisit Wroclaw in the future. What will I be looking for in this city? Where will my feet take me? Will the future me see the present me through the familiar, lit window?
“Your home is where they let you in for the pandemic” – was the title of one of the best articles on life in lockdown that I have read. It told the stories of nomads like myself: Erasmus students, ex-pats, and wanderers stuck in places they had just intended to pass through. For the second year in a row, my home is Wroclaw, and I am very thankful for this city.
Take it as my whim, but I do like to think about my relationships with cities in the same terms as love relationships. You meet, you get to know each other, you have experiences together, and develop feelings. You break each other’s hearts (or not) and leave or stay. The season when Wroclaw and I met was a restraining one. This city literally never opened up to me, but it’s not its fault. I walked through its central streets on a Friday evening, but the doors were closed, the cafes empty, the parties silenced, the music down, the restaurants only offering food to go, museums locked, theaters with lights off, venue halls abandoned. I went jogging on a Sunday morning through its main square, around the City Hall, without meeting anyone. I feel your pain, dear city, your craving to be alive, to fill your rooms with music, laughter, and togetherness.
Wroclaw, you have become my refuge.
And I hope I will be able to say sincerely, with my heart full of gratitude to this city when one day I come back for a visit:
Hello again, Wroclaw!
Je t’aime!
Photo cover by Julia Dragan