Boston in Black-and-White

The Boston I love is not just confined to Boston. It is Cambridge, Somerville, Allston, Brighton, Arlington. It’s all the places I’ve walked, biked, picnicked, photographed. Boston was my home for a very long time, and returning after a-year-and-a-half away was lovely and strange: desperately familiar and yet wrapped completely in a life I left behind.

I am incapable of completely living in the moment in Boston- there are too many memories, the past is too present. Every street holds a story. I see layers of my old lives and old loves folding over and over each other like invisible cloth. Boston is emotionally exhausting for me, but it’s also invigorating. After living away for so long, it was good to be in a place that reminds me who I am, flaws and all. When I returned to Boston this summer, my days and nights were filled with reunions with old friends, and I was overwhelmed by the love. Boston is the sort of place where I can leave a coffee date with a friend, end up watching a local brass band playing in a square, collide with a different friend, and end up having a long and unexpected catch-up over beer and raw oysters. It was my community, and in some part of my heart, it still is.

I walked everywhere this summer. From the back alleys of Somerville’s Union Square to the glorious parks of Boston’s Rose F Kennedy Greenway to the banks of the Charles River, I retraced years of steps. William Faulkner knew what he was talking about: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”