Living
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Photo source: unsplash.com by Laith Abdulkareem
I think people at the end of blogging (or blogging projects) want to come to some profound conclusion. They want to be able to say that they’ve changed their mind about something and suddenly they’re going to live a different life. At least I feel like this should have some deep conclusion, and maybe I’m the only one. I could pretend and say I have changed my mind about the city, but that would be lying. I don’t want to lie just so my blog can somehow fulfill this weird sense of having completed a journey. I do want to say that while I enjoy living in the country way more than the city, I don’t hate the city. My feeling about the city hasn’t changed drastically enough to warrant a change, but I find that I don’t hate the city as much as I once did.
Being in the city still makes me anxious; it’s still not a calming place to me. The city is still too loud, too smelly, too chaotic. But this year I moved to a different part of the city (and to a much nicer apartment) that has its own backyard. I’ve only lived in places that had streets or parking lots as their view and it wasn’t calming to look at. My new apartment is on a quieter street, so instead of hearing traffic I get to hear nature sounds, like in this video (which I like to listen to while writing).
While I don’t go out there often, it does make a difference to me to see the trees out my bedroom window and know that there is some patch of green near me.
The other changing factor that makes the city more bearable is knowing that I have people who care about me here. There are people in the country who care about me as well, but I’ve found people that care about me in the city and somehow that makes it a little less lonely (the people I’ve found certainly wouldn’t leave me lying on the pavement with a broken ankle).
I guess what matters is that I’m living my life. There will always be the country to go back to, and even though I hate it less than before, I still need to live in the city at this point in my life, which is something that I’ll never love, but I certainly don’t hate.
Madeleine Lange-Chenier
Madeleine Lange-Chenier is a small-town girl who much prefers the feel of grass beneath her feet than concrete city streets. She likes to read (mostly fiction), write (just about anything), and tell her pets how cute they are (approximately 1,000 times a day). She makes really good guacamole and really bad cheese scones.
