Still

"Dense." That's the word I would give it if I were limited to one word. Dense with history, people, cars, buildings. Even the trees cling to every curb, determined to crush out any sense of space. I grew up with fields and pastures, and I need to see sky sometimes. There is no sky in that New England metropolis, just age and culture. Consequently, I found myself wanting to strike out at people on the subways and sidewalks in panic for a little elbow-room, some air to breathe. From buying groceries to having a drink with friends, everything is hard there, dense and hard. There are just too many people in too small a space - all of them scurrying to secure for themselves what you want for yourself. They are your unwelcome competitors for materials, attention, and space, and you are theirs. Certainly they can be nice, if you can slide beneath their hard exterior, their instantaneous "No!" But if you want to survive, you have to push them before they push you. It is a constant struggle in which even the weather beats at you, a cold that seeps into your bones until you think you will never be warm again.

I cannot live there anymore.

And yet…I miss. I miss tea at a café on Newbury Street on a spring afternoon when the snowmelt puddles on street corners and drips from the awnings of Armani and Prada. The air so heavy it dampens the sounds of cars rushing past and sidewalk conversations carried out in Mandarin and French. I miss brick townhouses that remember the Revolution, plain and solid on the outside with glimpses of marble fireplaces and crystal chandeliers through rippled, centuries-old glass. Things were built to last there. I miss narrow, winding streets that never quite come out where one thinks. Every journey is one of confusion, followed by discovery. I miss the river that freezes so hard in winter people drive on it, and in spring, breaks out with Ivy League crew teams that glide over its surface like maroon-clad swans. I miss used-music stores in Harvard Square where millionaires' sons in second-hand clothes haggle with sales clerks over $10 CDs. I miss the Museum of Fine Arts where blue-collar workers from Southie spend a Saturday admiring Van Goghs and Renoirs with no more self-consciousness than they would feel at a construction site near Fenway. I miss Robert Frost, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. I miss fresh lobster in summer and flame-colored trees in Autumn. And most of all, I miss the pubs, places where my friends and I listened to Irish bands and talked about our classes while drinking Guinness served by people who know how it should taste, the feel of warm camaraderie on cold, winter nights.

I miss Boston.