living cities

I am trying to write something cohesive about last year, but I can’t seem to find a way to do it. One of the questions that keeps bugging me is why I never feel "at home" wherever I am.

Home: I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what home is to me. At times I have said that home exists wherever you love someone. We each have a bit of home divided up and spread throughout the world. As I get older and as I move more and more, I am not quite sure that this is the case. When I go to a place with people that I love, the place feels comfortable, but not like home. I found this out first when I moved back to California after college. The place felt comfortable and I knew my way around, but I had a tumultuous relationship with Orange County and quickly realized that I always had. I don’t think that I wasn’t welcome in OC, but the welcome felt temporary, as though the county was trying to tell me that I didn’t belong.
Neil Gaiman, in his Sandman series, has a comic called “A Tale of Two Cities.” In the comic a man wakes up and finds himself in the dream of the city in which he spent his entire life. In that dream he encounters a man who tells him that the city is indeed asleep. He did not know when the city would wake, but was fearful of what might happen if and when that occurred.
As I move from place to place, and city to city, I wonder if some cities are asleep and some are awake. If I personify Orange County, I can imagine someone with authority fast asleep. As they sleep, a raucous party forms around them. Throughout the party, people draw on OC’s face, they put OC’s hand in cold water and cover OC’s face with shaving cream. OC sleeps so deeply that eventually the partygoers stop worrying about the possibility of OC waking up. They shave OC a Mohawk. They tattoo “enter here” just above OC’s ass. With all this having happened, what will the repercussions be when OC finally does wake up? Maybe OC will just accept what happened and try to move forward. Maybe OC will get belligerent and do something crazy to the partygoers. Who knows. Time will tell.
Just thinking of a city as alive is, I think, a productive act. This is not to say that I think that people will treat their cities better if they thought of them as alive. We treat living things poorly all the time. To look at a city as alive is to see that everything about that city has gone into giving it the life it possesses, from the lay of the land that attracted the first people to it and determined how the infrastructure would be laid, to the people who continue to build/destroy/preserve the city today. These things affect the temperament of the city. They make it so some parts work better than others and some not at all. We can think of our relationship to a city, then, as sometimes parasitic, sometimes symbiotic, and sometimes both. Furthermore, if we think of these relationships as not inherently good or bad, but simply complicated and fluctuating (we move back and forth between the various relationships, and the city does as well), we can see that, depending on the current state of a city and its population, those relationships might need to shift and change. What is good for one city and its residents might not be good for others. Of course, what is good for one city is not necessarily good for its inhabitants, and vice versa.
I said that my relationship to OC was tumultuous. I felt that I was welcomed, but not because I belonged, but because I had been there for so long and had given a lot of my life and time to OC and its inhabitants. I had friends and family there, some of whom really belong there. However, what I wanted from a city was not what I found in OC. I used the analogy of a sleeping authority and it well may be that OC is sleeping and yet to wake up. It could be the inhabitants of the city that I don’t mesh well with. It could be the city itself. It could also be, and this is probably it, a combination of the two.
I have lived in 8 cities. I have visited countless others. It’s hard for me to say if any of the cities I’ve visited could ever be home. I’m still not quite sure what home is. I’m thinking that it has to do with being able to maintain a symbiotic relationship with a city which means that I would be willing to give and take from the city and allow the city to give and take from me. I have yet to feel comfortable enough with a city to allow this exchange to take place. I want to say that the closest I’ve felt to this was the few months I spent in Dublin, and the couple of weeks I spent in San Francisco and Boston. I was attracted to each of these cities for different reasons and found more reasons once there that I wanted to be there, but have still not explored them sufficiently. While in those cities I acted primarily as a tourist, which is a very different experience than living in a city. I also sometimes wonder if I have created some sort of idealized city in my head that doesn’t really exist. Of course, I’ve never really felt comfortable in the places I’ve lived and always wanted to move on, and I think that there’s something to be said about that.