This City

I wondered why it didn’t love me

I wondered why it felt cold and unwelcoming

Why it kept me behind walls

Why it couldn’t.. just wouldn’t feel like home

After everything

The years that went by

The people that came and left

The ones that stayed

The fleeting moments of joy

The heartaches and the longing

For the soft feel of the familiar

Until I realized I hadn’t ever loved it either

That I peered at it with a closed heart

I kept it out with every last brick I could find

Straining to get a good look… but only from the outside

After all, home was back somewhere else

that I had left behind in a different time

So I searched high and low

For a person, a soul

A human, to call my own

To make all this…. strangeness… feel like home

And then

I found her

Staring back at me in the mirror

My soulmate, my best friend

My long lost lover

Me.

“A thousand times I search for him in the crowd,

But when I turn around all of a sudden,

There he is in the dim light of a lantern.”

— Xin Qiji, translated by Zhang Shuyue and Wang Feng