"And I used to love the idea of the city,"
She told me laying on the couch, her black hair rooting themselves among the threads and resting against the pillow while the tv played soundlessly in the background.
"I loved the thought of the night life and the city lights and the fast cars and all that it entailed," she sighed, turning her head towards me to meet my eyes.
"But when I got there I found out that most of those things left me craving something more,.. you know, no one talks about the traffic or the smoke, waking up to a drill hitting concrete every morning," she said as her hand touched her head gently.
"No one talks about the headaches you carry throughout the day, the space that you feel you're taking up when there's millions more bodies around you. It felt, like..." she paused,
"Suffocating?" I asked, interjecting in-between her thought for what felt like had been minutes.
"Yes!" she groaned, while looking at the ceiling again. "The city was supposed to be where I was going to find myself, where I was going to grow and thrive and now I'm right back where I started."
"That's true," I told her softly, "but you aren't the same person you were at the start. You've grown and learned things about yourself."
Meanwhile I started looking for the Advil in the cabinets to help her with her headache,
"It's easy to fantasize about what life will be like when we leave, when we are "free", but the thing that we don't realize is that it's often not the place that makes us happy, but ourselves."
I smiled gently, as I handed her the medicine. She nodded silently as she took her water in hand.
"I could be wrong, but I think that you wanted the city to distract you from the things that you were dancing with internally, the noises that you couldn't silence while you were here. But nothing speaks louder than our own insecurities."
I said as I sat back down in my own chair, knowing I was speaking to myself as much as I was her.
"And I know you may not be happy to be back," I said, looking at her from the across the room.
"But I'm glad that you're home. With all its faults, I'm glad that you have a place that you can come back to when everywhere else seems a bit to loud."
- And the world has beautiful things to offer, but I think that happiness, true happiness, comes from somewhere deep within ourselves...