Please come to Boston

From Modern Heidi at Legally Heidi:

Hey Modern Readers, I’m Modern Heidi from Life in Pink filling in for Modern Gal on this happy Friday. By the time you all read this, I’ll probably be out and about in the city I fell in love with seven years ago.

Seven years?! Was September 2001 really almost seven years ago?! That’s when I moved into college on a tree lined street in Boston as a naïve eighteen year old. Five years later in May 2006, I stood on a street corner with a few bags waiting to spend a week at a friends apartment on the other side of town. Two weeks later, Boston and I had a very nasty falling out.

I guess that’s what happens when you fall in love with a city and associate it so closely to your life. It rained for 13 days straight almost during my last two weeks there, it rained non stop till the night I walked out on my ex of a year and a half (off and on of course…) and then? The next day as I took the same bags I hauled from my on campus apartment moments after graduation, I stood on another corner waiting for a cab to take me to the train station where I’d move home to Vermont for the first time in four and a half years.

But Boston and I? We go way back. We’ve fought – after all, have you experienced a Boston winter? Standing in a snow bank that’s taller than you while waiting for a bus for an hour in 30 below weather en route to your last political theory class of the semester…only to show up 45 minutes late, frozen and drenched, that’s a Boston winter. Yeah I did not like Boston so much those days. But then there were nights, the late summer nights where I’d sit in the quad with friends until the sprinklers went off after last call and we’d run through them giggling in a drunken stupor. The nights when we’d all laugh and sing “Sweet Caroline” with our arms around one another swaying drunkenly smiling in the bar, or the days when we’d sit out on the Esplanade listening to some free concert or other. Those days and nights? Those were when I loved that city.

The city embraced me, it let me grow, it comforted me when I needed it, allowing me to become a hermit when I needed to – when I had the flu for a week and though none of my friends called to check up on me, the city made the weather cold and snowy and dreary assuring me that if I could just get better? It would ensure that the weather would be perfect for my flight to Europe a week later for my last spring break. It laughed with me or at me if the case should be when I’d get heels stuck in the brick sidewalks that had a few too many gaps between the bricks, or when I’d get the T door slammed in my face only to have it start down pouring seconds later while I waited for the next train.

But as we know, every modern gal has to grow up. Every modern gal has to move on, so though there are still places in the city that make me smile to myself remembering the time that my pals and I peed in a dark alley or followed our favorite hockey players home from the bar, there are also the places that I look at and just feel a knot in my stomach, remembering the nights of screaming matches and tears, the nights when I wanted nothing more than to leave it all behind and start anew some place entirely different.

And leave it all behind I did. When I got onto the train to Springfield where I’d meet my dad, I knew I wouldn’t be sticking around too long. I just needed a plan. So while my ex pleaded with me to work things out and let him come to visit me in the hills of Southwestern Vermont, I declined. I took a hiatus and visited family and then? I made the decision to move to DC.

DC has been quite good to me, I’ve got no beefs with it, though I’m not too much a fan of the sweltering summers and the mild and rainy winters, I do love seeing the Capitol Dome every morning when I look down Pennsylvania Avenue before getting on the metro and I do love going home to the memories of college and school and me becoming the gal that I am thanks to Boston.

This weekend, I’ll be trekking to New Hampshire (New Hampster for dorks like me) for a wedding shower, visiting old haunts with dear friends and going sailing with boyfriend and a couple friends of his. It all should be a good time because for as many memories as Boston and I have? There are always new ones waiting to be made each time I go back.

So modern readers, what city brings back those kinds of memories to you? Any place you’re dying to move to?? Enjoy your Memorial Day Weekend everyone and don’t forget to check out my blog!!!