Old Lovers
I was getting coffee the other day, and if you follow my facebook, you know what happened. I was sitting peacefully at my table when two ladies came in and sat next to me. The music was loud, but i could tell they were not speaking English. Its been a while, and technically, there were a half dozen very similar languages that it could have been...but after a lot of concentrating, I swear to you they were speaking Croatian.
I listened blissfully while I sipped my coffee and at times closed my eyes and pretended I was in a Croatian cafe drinking real coffee. (and not this mass produced swill!!) Its been forever since I heard someone really speaking Croatian. I could really barely make out anything they said. I hear some numbers, I heard them gossip about a lady and I may have heard them talk about God briefly too. But the word for God and mister are very close, so again...I could have made up most of this in my head.
But as I sat swirling through the memories of Croatia, I remembered a conversation I had had with a friend over coffee several weeks earlier. We had both spent time overseas after college and still found ourselves thinking often about those foreign cities. We had dreams about them, googled pictures of them, had conversations in our head in their languages...as we talked, we decided that it sounded less like a city we used to live in and much more like we were reminiscing about old lovers; the way they smelled, the way they challenged us, the way they made us laugh, how much we missed them, how much we wished we could just see them one more time...see how they were, how they had changed, and know they were doing ok without us.
Its startling how much one lone experience can change you. Twenty two short months with a city felt like a lifetime. A separate, eternal, amazing lifetime.
And of course, as with exes, we had chosen to only remember the good times. Never remember the longing for a Dr. Pepper, or the fear of going to the store, or the awkward ways you would insult people unintentionally, or the complete ache of longing for home.
No, our old cities were perfect for us. And forever from now, they will still own a peice of us. We will always carry pictures of them, share stories of our lives together, and once in a while in the dusk of a summer day, catch the hint of their fragrance in the air and sigh.
I listened blissfully while I sipped my coffee and at times closed my eyes and pretended I was in a Croatian cafe drinking real coffee. (and not this mass produced swill!!) Its been forever since I heard someone really speaking Croatian. I could really barely make out anything they said. I hear some numbers, I heard them gossip about a lady and I may have heard them talk about God briefly too. But the word for God and mister are very close, so again...I could have made up most of this in my head.
But as I sat swirling through the memories of Croatia, I remembered a conversation I had had with a friend over coffee several weeks earlier. We had both spent time overseas after college and still found ourselves thinking often about those foreign cities. We had dreams about them, googled pictures of them, had conversations in our head in their languages...as we talked, we decided that it sounded less like a city we used to live in and much more like we were reminiscing about old lovers; the way they smelled, the way they challenged us, the way they made us laugh, how much we missed them, how much we wished we could just see them one more time...see how they were, how they had changed, and know they were doing ok without us.
Its startling how much one lone experience can change you. Twenty two short months with a city felt like a lifetime. A separate, eternal, amazing lifetime.
And of course, as with exes, we had chosen to only remember the good times. Never remember the longing for a Dr. Pepper, or the fear of going to the store, or the awkward ways you would insult people unintentionally, or the complete ache of longing for home.
No, our old cities were perfect for us. And forever from now, they will still own a peice of us. We will always carry pictures of them, share stories of our lives together, and once in a while in the dusk of a summer day, catch the hint of their fragrance in the air and sigh.
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