The city is like the lover, and the lover is just like the city - that’s what I told her today. It makes sense, though it takes a awhile to put together.
Over the months, the years, the lifetimes journal that I have walked the streets, nothing seems more obvious to me than this. Both - lovers/cities - are full of hope, angelic, unrestrained, boundless, overfed with chocolates, poetry, story, song, and virginal they await for another to come and open them. But, they are also whores, they can betray you, and suffocate all with pillows still warm from making love. She did not understand this last thought, and raised an eyebrow and looked afraid. I smiled. “How can you think that? That’s the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard anybody say,” she said. Ahh hell, I thought. But she is still young and I explained it to her.
I told her how hearts are tricksters and how they see red lights and they see babies in carriages and how they get hungry, how they cry at an old photo, or an old film, or how they get lost in dressing rooms and look at mirrors and wonder what others would think, how they fall down several flights of stairs at a time, how they regret and sigh over the one who moved from them, how they light up when they are filled up in the night, how they breathe and cough from cigarettes, how they could dream it if they could sleep, how they are wrapped in too many obligations and fear the breaking of another of their own kind, and also how they devour their own kind like cannibals - hearts are like cannibals, I said, and in some parts of the world, you get stronger by eating your own kind or the heart.
And cities and lovers have hearts too, I said.///