existential crisis and the city

 I'm currently visiting a city I lived in for 3 years during university. I'm here to see a flat I might potentially be renting starting September (that is, if I get accepted to a MA programme I applied to). It's a strange feeling visiting a city you spent so much time in and I'd be lying if I said it didn't send me down a bit of an existential spiral.

The thing is, I really thought I'd spend a big portion of my life here; that this would be the place where I settle down. Two of these years, I lived with someone I thought I was gonna stay with as well. I thought I had built a home, albeit a small and shaky one since I was 20, but mine and one that'd keep growing in a way I'd planned. I saw a man I was going to grow into, a career, a good life, even if a bit disappointing compared to what I'd envisioned as a teenager, but hey, whose isn't?

Now everything is different, but there's not a day where I regret uprooting that life. I might feel lost now, I might have no real plan on how to get to where I want to be, but I do know where I want to get, sort of, vaguely, eventually. I see a version of me that is unapologetically (ok, maybe a bit apologetically) myself. Me, that has given up on the concept of a corporate career and on the concept of sharing a city with over two million people. Me that's in a completely different relationship, likes different music, dresses differently, has new hobbies.

It's weird to come to a place that you thought would become your home just to realise that it was a chapter and even when you return for a couple years, it'll be just another one. Like those episodes of Sex and The City where Carrie moves to LA. I just don't see my life here anymore if I'm being honest. It's hard to say I've outgrown it, like I've outgrown my hometown, but I just can't see this place as ever becoming home to me. And that feels so strange to say. But if this has taught me anything, it's that I can never know what my life will be in 3 years.

picture of warsaw from the tallest building in the city centre