Leaving the City of My Innocence

Photos courtesy of Caitlyn Kinsella.

“I was thinking of asking a friend, What’s Cairo like?, and then wondered if that made sense, if it’s possible to explain a city.”

Recently, my father gave up his apartment in Boston. Sadly, it made sense. It was a temporary lease; he and the rest of my family moved to North Carolina four years ago, and he now works almost entirely remotely. The last time I was there, in early November, I didn’t realize it would be the last time I could make use of the apartment, that it was the last time I would be able to wander through Eataly, buy pasta and wine an hour out from midnight, not even needing a coat because the walk back would be so short.

I grew up around Boston, lived the first twenty years of my life in a number of houses all within thirty minutes of Back Bay. It’s not a city I know well — I’ve still never been to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, don’t even know what’s in Mission Hill — but it’s a place full of the time before my adult life began. A childhood spent visiting the aquarium and designing digital fish at the Science Museum. Learning to drive in the horror of winter nights to get to art classes at the MFA, and endless summer evenings spent at Fenway, watching the sky soften to vivid splendor behind the lit John Hancock sign, royal blue against gold still my favorite combination of colors (and the time I read a Shannon Hale novel all the way through, until the top of the ninth, and the woman behind me said she’d never seen anyone read through a game).

I was thinking of asking a friend, What’s Cairo like?, and then wondered if that made sense, if it’s possible to explain a city. Wondered how I would put Boston into words, if someone asked me.

I don’t use the T, because when you walk by the openings, there’s a certain smell I associate with being trapped down there, in the summer, unsure if the trains will ever come. That when I was fifteen, let loose in the city unchaperoned for the first time, I asked my friend M what kissing was like, while the friend of ours I wanted to kiss ran into a Dunkin’ Donuts to use the restroom. All the times I ate Chipotle in Boston Common. That the Harvard Coop (technically Cambridge, but let’s not get technical, because Harvard Square and MIT are the sites of some of my greatest childhood escapades), was where friends and I plotted our lives, sitting on the floor, backs against bookshelves. That the chocolate shop a street over from that bookstore is where M went over the first story I ever gave her for real critique, handed over in the seriousness of a Manila envelope. That two months ago, I bought Phish Food ice cream in England, because when I was a teenager, my siblings and I ate it while discussing Evanescence and waiting for Shakespeare on the Common to start (2013 — the year hot August rain drove us home before The Two Gentlemen of Verona was even half over; 2016 — the year I took my brother to Love’s Labour’s Lost a week after M stopped speaking to me, having slipped a note into one of the books I returned to her doorstep, letting her know her favorite play was on, hoping, somewhere in the crowd, I’d see her. That Logan is the airport I flew into, in 2019, a month after M started speaking to me again, to make the familiar trek out of the city to her parents’ yellow house on the hill, on the same round-about exit as the high-steepled church.)

I want to ask what Cairo is like because I want to know if it’s somewhere I could ever travel to, alone. Boston is a city where I am always looking over my shoulder. A city that held my small ambitions, when crossing a street still caused anxiety, when I knew I wanted to live in other places, but still barely knew how to get myself to an unknown grocery store. It is a city where I still get nervous, two streets away from a known landmark. It is not a place I have ever been comfortable in. Returning, I reverse. My growing comes undone. I question my ability to navigate, go cold with apprehension turning corners into back alleys, plow my way home before dark. It is a place where I forget how to take care of myself, where everything is a little off-kilter.

But the last time I was there, delirious with jet lag, walking golden in the sunshine, I composed letters in my head to explain my happiness to someone I had left across an ocean. I was only there for a week, tucked in my father’s (now a stranger’s) apartment, waiting to let the promise of other adventures pull me into the sky, across the continent, into unfamiliar West Coast cities. I went to that chocolate shop, where the ghosts of two writers sat dissecting a story about a college road trip, just a few months before they made such a road trip together. I revisited my favorite bookstores, sat in the sun on the banks of the Charles. Had shakshuka in a new café. Braved a tangle of unlit staircases and service elevators for a rooftop view. Tried to piece together a way to explain the stubborn love I have for all the difficult things.

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Caitlyn Kinsella is an itinerant bibliophile and lover of long words.  She can currently be found declaiming the Odyssey in order to avoid working on her thesis.