The facet fix­tures go first. And the locks and ceil­ing fans. Then the pantry fol­lowed by the neigh­bor’s gar­den and the cof­fee shop on 21st Av­enue where the tweak­ers played chess and hid their drugs in the bil­low­ing ceil­ing. The sky­line be­comes a snag­gle­tooth smile: some build­ings you can con­jure with high res­o­lu­tion, oth­ers aren’t there at all.

One day you’ll wake up and for­get the name of your apart­ment build­ing. You still re­mem­ber the street you lived on. That will do for now. But the next month that will be gone, too. It must be writ­ten some­where. You’ll find it later.

Our mem­ory de­prives us of our cities. They dis­solve among the pre­sent needs: the shop­ping lists and hair­cuts and flat tires. And in the end, it’s not our for­get­ful­ness we get angry at. It’s the feel­ing that some­thing is being with­held.

That’s where nos­tal­gia comes in.

I have friends who talk about the place from which they came as if they were still a part of it. How the his­toric neigh­bor­hoods or pas­tries were just right. The sum­mer thun­der­storms or the fierce­ness with which the lo­cals lived. But the place is not theirs any­more. It never was. It’s a place; it has no per­son­al­ity be­yond that which we im­pose on it.

I’m guilty of this, too. “The cul­ture of Nashville acts like the hu­mid­ity. It’s ubiq­ui­tous and in­escapable and you can’t help but be con­scious of it,” I’ve told friends in Port­land. I haven’t lived in Nashville for two years, but it has a way of creep­ing to the fore­front of my mind when I lis­ten to “Elvis Pres­ley Blues” or spot my bolo tie hang­ing next to my belts.

Al­berto Fuguet, a Chilean di­rec­tor, shares this sen­ti­ment. In an essay for a Nashville paper, he wrote,

Nashville was a place — a myth, per­haps — that I knew ex­isted but had no real idea about, ex­cept for some clichés that, even­tu­ally, would come in handy. Now... I re­al­ize that Nashville is in­ex­tri­ca­bly part of my life and al­ways will be. Funny how things work out. It is, no doubt about it, my "sec­ond city," my home away from home, the place I will al­ways re­turn even if I never visit it again. There are other cities that I have lived in for a lot more time... but there is some­thing very deep and pri­vate about my re­la­tion­ship to Nashville.

Do you see what he does there? He an­thro­po­mor­phizes the city. Speaks of it as if the city were a for­mer love. Acts as though the city can jet­set be­tween Ten­nessee and Chile when he needs her to. But cities aren’t mo­bile; we’re the ones who move.

Yet, I dis­agree that we are as mo­bile as we like to be­lieve. We can’t hop from one city to an­other and re­main com­pletely whole. Cities don’t leave you, they ooze out of you like sweat, leav­ing  a trail of un­kept, fuzzy mem­o­ries that may men­ace or pacify your pre­sent with­out warn­ing. It takes a Grey­hound ticket to leave a city but more than a life­time for that city to leave you. And the tragedy is, you don’t get to choose what stays and what doesn’t.