Cities; or categorizing your personalities

I am used to watching you as London, letting everything in, in, in, and then bursting in seams. With unexpected visitors, blinking lights of establishments from conquered lands, coffee on the go, and cold nights. All the while you bury the skeletons, down, down, down below.

You forgot how to be Bandung. It is lost in your dictionary, wedged between the words "vacation" and "rucksack". The coldness that used to be oozing from your skin is no longer there, instead you savour it from the city where you are. It is not lost in me that we now only exchange few lousy hellos.

Maybe you tried to be Bali, once, when you were little. All bright, exotic, seductive, and forgiving. A grand feast to the senses, everything is amplified. But it did not fit you. The howling wind soothes your heartsick better than the thundering sounds of beach party. You shed it off, easier than the leaves turning.

You long for being Zurich. You want to claim stability, openness, and blatant display of order. A peaceful state of neutrality, not letting yourself  set aflame by expectations and self-imposed goals. Everything should not be confusing, nor it should be patternless. Yet you are drawn into chaos.

However, sometimes I found myself wishing you were Jakarta. Alive, beating with pulse, right here, closer to where my parents build their empire, familiar, colorful. Yet I know, I can't push you into something that has only caused me longings and loneliness. I have experienced firsthand that this partial-metropolitan city has not given me total liberation.

There are days when I found you as Milan. Overbooked with inexplicable numbers of thoughts, slivered all over the old ones and new, like herd of consciousness. Everything that has ever happened, even the beautiful revolutions and the overthrows, is still subdued by the steps of temporary visitors. You wonder about what happened during the supremacy, was it dark due to its intense bloodshed and betrayal, or was it the foundation of your current state.

But you can be anti-Amsterdam, too. Burning bridges, lighting up the path away from the continent that has the right to oversee your growth. Always too far, yet it is so close, from the grasping hands of the blood of your blood. No harmony comes from your mayhem.

And you are Prague, revisited. You are spoken secrets thriving in this small corner, a joint lead by cobblestoned street that has a specialty in reviving old jazz music. In here, there is no excuse to be taciturn. The beats mend broken hearts, tired eyes, and wanting mouth. You try to stand with each foot on different sides, you want to acknowledge your ancestor, still getting in touch with your mysticism and symbolic victory, but you are pushed into changes. Modernity is trying to adjust itself on you. You look content.

I should not have expected you to be molded into just one city; an all encompassing person like you only deserve to be like the best part of the world, forever changing.