Thrilladelphia Throwback - Plain Old City Living

The following is an excerpt from a personal blog entry I wrote at the beginning of the year. The tension between my high-octane wanderlust and my codependent relationship with Philadelphia is a favorite topic of mine. Every once in a while I indulge my nostalgia and egomania and read through past blog entries like an old journal, and I thought this one might be worth sharing. Please feel free to append your own love/hate moments with our fair city.

it's funny living in the city. sometimes you feel like it's beating the shit out of you, days coming down on you like fists, hunching lower and lower trying to stay conscious, sane, something.

thoughts of escape only come at night. you remember the last time you left, that dry summer day, and the euphoria of feeling the gears shift with the skyline in your rear view, the marlboro 100s you bought that day to keep you busy while you sat in traffic outside of DC listening to "man in the mirror." remember that sunny balcony in south carolina, the leather couch, sleeping late into the day and listening to ABBA's "take a chance on me" when you woke up. eating spinach and tofu for breakfast, watching arrested development on your friend's laptop in front of the fireplace.

you remember the little pool in the sun and the shady lounge chairs and reading sonia sanchez and floating there for hours a day. the beach in savannah with the killer jellyfish, grey goose pear and tonics and pool tables and broke-ass bars and the big gay boy with the blue striped shirt who could pop it, lock it and drop it.

but mostly you remember the giddy feeling of seeing your own Philly skyline over the horizon again at the end of it all.

you've got a sick symbiotic bond with this cruel lover, full of an uncrackable mystique. you keep going back because it's splitting you open wondering what she's still withholding from you after all these years. the swelling inside you knowing that she's hiding someone from you in the basement of a dark bar, luring you in and out of her twisted alleyways with a promise on a string, a dollar, a whisper, a puff of smoke. you return and she's raining down on you, flakes of ash and shattered glass.

that's what it was, you realize, the force that pried open your lungs and your mouth on your rooftop that first night, under the full moon, on top of your world and wailing.