Life’s been pretty tough for me lately. Not tough in the sense of any devastating financial hardship, or dire medical diagnosis, or profound loss, but tough in, like, that vague ennui where you’re slumped on your couch on a Tuesday evening in your perfectly nice apartment and think, I’m bored. Thankfully, after a whirlwind seventy-two hours of travel, I found a solution to all my problems: packing up my entire life and moving to a city I’ve projected all my false hopes on.
Back home, I’m burdened with such annoyances as doing taxes, loading the dishwasher, or eating leftovers. But in this city where I spent three carefree days, I didn’t have to do any of those things even once. No, life’s much different here, in this new city with a similar population size and voter demographic.
Things are just more magical in this new city. For instance, there’s always something new to discover since I’ve never been here. Back home, I could close my eyes and walk to the nearest Panera from rote memory. But here, I close my eyes, start walking, and have no idea where I’ll end up. It did so happen that I also ended up at a Panera after nearly getting mowed down by an SUV after wandering blindly into oncoming traffic, but the journey to get there—and the signature bread bowl—were transformative.
This city’s energy and culture are unparalleled to anything I’ve experienced before. In my daily life back home, I have a routine and responsibilities, but here, for the extended three-day bacchanal during which I ate and drank my way around town, I really got a taste for the carefree lifestyle that permeates this city’s culture. People are just more apt to do things here. Every day on my jam-packed itinerary, I went to a museum, a historical site, or the pool at my hotel. I even passed by a park one day and—get this—saw some locals participating in a recreational softball league. This city’s really something special.
No, I did not think through what I will do for work here. That was not on my three-day itinerary, so please do not ask.
I’m also confident my dating life here will improve tenfold. In the major metropolitan city I toiled away in, dating was impossible. You would think that out of the hundreds of thousands of eligible singles in my area, I could find at least one person to form a meaningful, emotional bond dependent on mutual respect and admiration, yet all 593,230 of them were emotionally unavailable narcissists subservient to swipe culture who just didn’t “get” me. But I can just tell that dating here, in this exotic new city with a few unique regional idioms and an equivalent cost of living, will be entirely different. The people, like the bread bowls, are just better here. I may finally even find The One. Hell, my odds feel so good here that I may even find twenty-five The Ones; how am I even supposed to commit?
Who cares that I don’t know anyone here or that all my loved ones are two time zones away? Friends and family come and go, but a prosaic skyline punctuated by a distinct signature architectural structure that’s become a metonym for the city itself? Well, good luck finding another one of those, pal.
So don’t try to talk me out of my move. I’ve already packed my bags, found an apartment, and signed the lease. Now, on this fine Tueday, I will ease myself onto my new couch and wait for the endless possibilities of my new life to begin.