My City

My city is a city of sirens.

A city of footsteps and sidewalks and people with places to be.

A city of seasons, bleak and fleeting and indulgent and fresh.

My city is a city of change.

A city of principle in the daylight and neon in the dark, if you know where to be.

A city of people who belong, people who persist, and people who fear.

A city of the mountains,

A city of the streets.

A city of songs, a city of solitude, and a city of holding breaths.

A city of flavors--the divine, the solid, the average, the exquisite.

Mine is a city of nighttime walks. Of backstreets, of streetlights.

A city of conversations and secrets.

My city is a city of open arms.

A city without judgment, a city of no regrets.

A city of pollution.

My city is a city of friends on red rugs,

A city of apartments and heaters that sometimes work and refrigerators with soymilk and cranberry juice...if you know what I mean.

A city of souls, of hands, of lips all coming together.

A city of back porches and summer afternoons.

A city of the most incredible heartbreaks.

A city of new outlooks, of chance; A city of unbelievable choice.

A city of sleepovers and magic kissing and decisions, decisions, decisions, decisions.

Mine is a city of trains, of cars, and of airplanes that graze the horizon.

A city of grids.

A city of purpose.

My city is a city that breathes.

A city that lives.

A city that exists in loneliness and cohesion at exactly the same time.

And a city that never quite stops its progression or heartbeat.

Mine is a city of whatever I want it to be.

A city of silence.

My city is a city of sirens, of sidewalks.

Love, Jennifer

lasts

"I have recently become a secret connoisseur of 'last looks'. You know the way people look at you when they believe it's for the last time? I've started collecting these looks."

Anyone know the movie? I've been thinking about this a bit the past few days...last looks, last moments, last time being in one place at a certain time in your life, that kind of thing.

I find it very interesting how different things can seem depending on whether they will be changing anytime soon or not. There's always something indescribably sad about the last of anything for me, even when it's something I never enjoyed in the first place. Just knowing that I'll never have it again, or never have it in the same way again gives me such a feeling of strange melancholy. Every last day at a job, last day in a grade in school, last day of summer, last day of vacation, anything, leaves an impression on me. My usual response is to want a photograph, but that's never quite the same, is it?

Even more interesting are the last moments that pass by without even being noticed at the time. Something ends with a finality you never even expected, then only in retrospect can you see that it was the last. These are the worst. I hate the feeling of something sneaking up on me and ending just like that, without even being able to savor its bittersweet departure. That is, after all, the draw to last moments, I think--being able to bask in the absolutely wonderful and exquisitely painful last seconds. I find myself looking back and trying to remember and analyze exactly how I felt in that moment since I never had the time to appreciate it while it happened. Last looks and promises I made with a certain person before they dropped off the face of the earth. Last time holding hands, kissing, feeling connected before everything changed, inexplicably and unprecedented. It all seems so foreign in retrospect. I always think how could I not have grasped onto that moment before it slipped away? But then maybe things just seem better once they're gone.

And the very last kind...moments you know are the last without really knowing why. I think everyone's experienced this, and I can safely say it's one of the very most panic-inducing, completely uncomfortable things I have ever felt. A lot of details of our day-to-day lives pass by without ever being noticed, but these...no, these are burned into our minds in a very strange but persistent way because we know things are changing. It's kinda creepy sometimes, to be honest. It might be easier if we couldn't sense these things, because as much as we hate whatever reality we are facing, the other part of these feelings is that we know no matter what, there is nothing we can do to stop it. That moment when you know a breakup is imminent, or someone's love is slipping away, or your life is headed into a completely new direction--that means leaving behind the present. Strange is the best way I can describe it.

Maybe I find all of these things so intriguing because it's far too easy to take the moments we have for granted while we still have them. It's easy to forget just how things feel until it's passed us by. Ironically, I never feel more alive than when I'm faced with the opposite and equal forces of change and destruction and a lot of wholly unexpected and new events. I try to hold onto those last moments because they are the last solid things I'll have for awhile, and part of me knows it. Then, it's off I go into the unknown.

Love, Jennifer

Love this.