Dear Boston:
Take me back, please? I'm sorry; I was wrong. I'm coming home to your intrepid and narrow one-way streets. I'm returning to golden domes and molasses floods and rivers named after men. Concerts in dingy-looking basements and late-night kebab adventures. I'm coming back to you.
I thought capital buildings and capital cities could replace the contentment of sitting under trees on the Common or the view from World's End. That I could make a new family as dysfunctional and wonderful and insane and crazy and lovely as my own.
I'm sorry, my love. Take me back and don't be too harsh. Remember that I love you and that was never in doubt. I just had to see what else was out there. It doesn't work, Boston, not the nonsensical way you do.
I'm coming back to the city that prompted James Carroll to write:
To talk of the purely imagined elements of the mental map Americans carry of this city is the farthest thing from debunking these fondly held ideas as “mere myth,” as if there were anything mere about mythology. What we dream of, whether a lost past or a longed-for future, does, in fact, tell us something quite real about ourselves. Thus, the sentimental fog that wraps even Boston’s hard-edged actualities can lift to reveal something deeply authentic.
Love,
Ashley
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