Every City You Haven’t Moved To Yet

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in after years in Berlin—not tiredness exactly, but the feeling of having grown through a place rather than into it. The city swallows creativity the way certain relationships swallow personality: slowly, with affection, until one day the streets and the nights and the people no longer feel like yours. You didn’t leave. You just stopped arriving.

So you start dreaming outward. London. Stockholm. Tokyo. New York most of all, because New York has mythology on its side—if you can make it there, and all that. The idea is that elsewhere the doors are wider, the people more alive to possibility, the experiences heavier with meaning. You tell yourself this long enough and it starts to feel like fact.

Then you listen to the people who actually went. The song they sing is the same one you already know: boredom, disappointment, inspiration that never quite arrived, doors that turned out to be just as closed. Vashtie wrote about hiding her deep sadness about New York for years—the particular paralysis of loving a city you can’t make work for you, and not knowing how to leave. That lands differently when you’re sitting in Berlin composing the same fantasy in the opposite direction.

The dream of the other city is really just the dream of a self who finally fits somewhere. Berlin didn’t invent that feeling. Neither did New York.