A Love Letter to My Prosaic Hometown

★  by Julia Stern ★ 

I’ve always told people, “I’m going away” when they ask about my plans for the future. My laptop browsing history is sprinkled with fancy colleges clustered on the edges of America, always flaunting a hipster student body (Indie music and Carhartt beanies, of course) or too many tanned and smiling faces to count. My friends and I stroll wonky sidewalks under Pittsburgh’s unrelenting grey, and our minds drift away to mythical stories of our future. New York. SoCal. Paris. A tall husband with Timothée-esque looks, frequent foreign vacations, and all the enviable prerogatives of being somewhere. 

I don’t live in a rural area or a no-name town tucked in some forgettable part of America. I live in Pittsburgh. I could be in any other polluted seen-better-days medium-sized city and it would be the same. I am not ashamed — shame is harsh, unforgiving, and a big slap to a perpetual precinct of my soul. I’ll meet fleeting moments of love for my hometown every day. The staunch rivers that sparkle brown during summer and the old brick homes guarded by maple trees — never leaving the tenderness of what is known, but never losing the ambivalence of what is not. On the public buses, bygone faces from Catholic school mingle gracefully with international students; mammoth hospitals loom over decrepit homes from the 1920s. The new and the old meet in silent confrontation. 

“I saw heart-shaped waffles from last summer, my friend focusing her Canon-AE, the jitters of a first date, spilled sorbet that covered my thighs, playing harmonicas on wooded paths…”

I sit in an intimate cafe, eating a crêpe with too much Nutella, and question all my jumbled thoughts about life. The tired air of Pittsburgh saunters around me, carrying the cloud-induced Vitamin D deficiency that’s trailed us our whole lives. I keep trying to figure out who I am but I always stumble at tangibility. An infinite balancing act has composed my adolescence. Am I the unassuming lull of my home, or do I belong elsewhere — in the fast-paced opulence of far-away places? Why do I feel the need to choose, and why must I face the impending guilt of my decision? 

Never has the elusive idea of “escape” seemed more appealing, even when we ultimately fail to see the negative ramifications of our desires. The identity crisis of my city lives in me too. Maybe I want to leave in search of definition — if I find somewhere that defines itself explicitly, where natives can always describe their homes in interesting, pretty ways, I will be able to define myself too. It’s a silly thought; nowhere like that really exists, but the fantasy lazily taunts me regardless of my attempts to erase it. 

“An infinite balancing act has composed my adolescence. Am I the unassuming lull of my home, or do I belong elsewhere?”

It was last autumn when we drove up to an overlook with the best view of the city. Speeding along highways perched atop hills, listening to music with that classic creaky voice I had always loved, I watched the city murmur from afar. As the wind reminded me of the approaching winter — relentless and incessantly grey for many months — I gazed across my city. My home.

There were happier places I could have been, more exciting, more desirable, but for a moment, I didn’t see the solemn grey buildings squeezed between two rivers. I saw heart-shaped waffles from last summer, my friend focusing her Canon-AE, the jitters of a first date, spilled sorbet that covered my thighs, playing harmonicas on wooded paths; I saw my friends smiling, laughing, always eating too much Heinz ketchup. Hugging my parents after being gone too long, the trees that smelled like squid in spring, khaki and navy school uniforms, and the Panettone at Christmas dinner. I had never felt more delightfully alone with 300,000 other people, all existing amongst the myriad of sparkling lights in front of me.

For a moment, I saw myself — not a perfect reflection of my home, but a single entity of its breath. The provincial streets and freeways and neighborhoods and buildings would always be there, and they would always be part of me — not concrete, but evolving as I evolve, blossoming as I blossom, and defying as I defy. My desire to leave may lead me far-away in search of liberating excitement and adventure — to find the ripening tempest of unfamiliarity, to learn, and to tumble upon all the somewheres of the world. But who says all the “nowheres” of the world aren’t somewhere?  Who says Pittsburgh isn't somewhere?