When I was a kid, I wanted to run away from my hometown.
The boredom.
The quiet neighborhood that seemed to have nothing.
A place that never seemed to notice me.
Over the last two years, I’ve fallen in love with this city again—
now transformed into everything it wasn’t when I was a child.
There is no other place where you can sit in a hipster coffee shop
and have my mother point and say:
that used to be the greenhouse,
that was the laundromat,
this was the bus stop —
until I remind myself she’s already told me all this
more than once.