Falling in love with places is harder than falling in love with people. Those who have gone through a break up a time or two may beg to differ, but until you have traveled to a new place and been completely consumed and immersed by its lifestyle, only to be catapulted back into this reality of New Haven, Connecticut, you truly do not know heart break.
I am not here to bash New Haven, or Connecticut at all. I grew up here and I love this place. I had had, or so I thought, some of the best memories of my life here.
This city has watched me transform from a carefree freshman wasting away my days at Toads Place to a responsible, hard working young adult with dreams and goals I am determined to achieve. So for that I am grateful, and I love this place.
The problem? I love another place more. I left my heart in a city that is 3,000 miles away and just like a first love, as hard as I try, I can’t get it off my mind. Every morning I wake up and have flashbacks to the days I would grab my surfboard and dip my toes in the Pacific Ocean. Every night I dream of the nights not too long ago I spent walking down Hollywood Boulevard with celebrities to my right and left. While sitting in class, I can’t focus, knowing that my dream job was handed to me on a silver platter and I had to pass because I have just one more year of college. And that is much, much harder to get over than any boy who I thought I might have been in love with.
When you travel to a new place and really lay down roots there, only to have them ripped up, the anguish is unreal. You make friends; some of whom will show you parts of yourself that you never knew existed, only to have to leave them. You’ll experience the best romance of your life, the kind they make movies about, only to have it cut too short as the summer turns to fall. The memories will taunt you, as will the Snapchat stories you replay every day of all your old friends going on with life without you; which really, that’s the hardest part. Watching an ex lover move onto someone new pails in comparison to watching the city in which you left every piece of yourself go on without you, maybe not even realizing you left.
Falling in love with a city only to have to say goodbye is heartsickness like no other, so I stand by my statement that falling in love with places is harder than falling in love with people. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The upside to falling in love with a place is knowing that eventually, you can go back and rekindle the flame that set your soul on fire.
