The Soul and Seoul

I normally don't write blogs that I haven't already planned out extensively. Normally, when I write anything, I take a piece of notebook paper and map out a rough outline of all the points I want to make. This perhaps makes my writing more professional and organized, but sometimes I do wonder if it's less inspired.

Anyway, last night I felt very inspired, so I'll give you now an unmapped out, less organized rush of feeling.

Have you ever walked alone in a big city? I did so tonight. I was wondering around, looking for a shop to buy playing cards in. It was a cold night, and the cold wrapped itself around me in electric pinpricks on every inch of exposed skin. It was a busy night, with lights piercing the darkness of strange corners, and throngs of people stepping and sighing and laughing before and behind me.

Suddenly, I felt an inexplicable throb in my heart, a shudder through my whole body that signified a rush of love. I learned against inky brick in the shadows of a building, closed my eyes to cover emotion, and swallowed down tears. I couldn't say why, exactly I felt like crying, it was just that at that instant I felt so connected to the city and everything in it.

I've felt this feeling before, a feeling of connectedness and love for not just the people in the city, but the whole city itself, as if it was a person. The first time I remember feeling it was when I was young, maybe five years old, and I was on the mountain of my home town, Chattanooga, Tennesseee, looking down at the city at night. All the houses lit up looked like the sky turned upside down, and I felt like the whole world had flipped, and I stood looking down into the sky instead of up at it. And the longer I looked down, and tried to comprehend each light representing a room, representing a person, and I couldn't believe there were so many people in the whole world, each with rooms and lights and lives behind those lights. And my childish heart beat inside my small chest, and I felt that love for the city.

When I go back to Chattanooga, I still have those moments. They come at strange times, and for strange things like a Kudzu vine coming out of a crack on a stone fence, or looking at a yellow wooden house next nearly hidden in the mountain. In Chicago, the first time I felt that love was seeing an Arabic diner next to a Vietnamese laundromat. I have that feeling of love for Calcutta sometimes, and I've never even been. Sometimes I can close my eyes and imagine what I wrote in a story that took place there, "Yellow dust, like curry powder, rises in the air with each step and settles on the back of my neck, wet with perspiration from the muggy air," and I feel Calcutta on the back of my neck, and I love it.

The feeling of love for a city as an entity is almost unavoidable in St. Louis. I think I feel it every day. I feel it when I run my hands along chain link fences, and imagine that the sound is a song played just for me. I notice it when I go to school in the morning and see Old Gold Teeth, a man who comes out to sit and watch the world all day. I notice that love again when I come home an Old Gold Teeth is still there, nodding. I feel it when I think in colors of the gradient shades of white, red, and brown of the brick apartments and houses and the people behind them. I feel it in locked eyes, and returned smiles, and passing glances. Sometimes I feel it for no reason, bubbling up in my chest just because I breathed in deep...

My friend Britney told me that if she ever visited me in St. Louis, it better be as good as I described it to her. "The way you talk about it makes it sound like Manna from heaven." "It is!" I said, and all the other people from St. Louis just shook their heads.

I feel like to know a city is to love it. When I saw the world turned upside down for a moment in Chattanooga, I knew something deep and personal about the city... St. Louis I know like it's a friend I've talked to. Somehow, last night in the cold and dark, seeing a thousand bright faces reflecting the neon lights of the city, for just a moment I knew something unsearchable about it , and I loved Seoul.