How you know when they're The One

Today I was curled up in bed contemplating getting up, without enthusiasm but for once without urgency, and I thought about Cambridge.

Specifically I thought about Cambridge in the summer, summer rain on a hot afternoon. And the smell of rain on warm stone brought the whole city back to me - every street and passage and pathway.

I think Cambridge is the most beautiful city in the world, but there's more to how I feel about her* than that.

I love her deeply, with a love that is bigger than myself. I love her past, I love her mysteries, I love all the things about her that are beyond my knowledge.

I love her intellectually, but also intimately. When I haven't seen her for a while I just can't keep myself from stroking her warm, lovely stones.

When I see her, she makes me happy. Happy in a non-trivial way, tinged with the opposites of happiness.

All her failings, her flaws and pomposities and contradictions, only serve to endear her to me the more. Even though sometimes I can't stand her, I always love her.

I wouldn't want one of those jealous, intense relationships - I'd want to spend time with other cities and I'm happy for her to have other people in her life - but I can imagine living with her the rest of my life and not regretting it or wishing myself anywhere else.

Things being the way they are, I can't see it happening any time soon, but I do hope, one day, we can be together.

In fact, I think she might just be The One.

Good to know.

[Hurray for the glorious oddities of life! I wrote most of this post yesterday but didn't quite get round to posting it. Then, yesterday night, I bought a Robbie Williams karaoke disc, the only one in English I could find in the bootleg CD shop, having discovered the massively exciting (to me) fact that one of my friends has a karaoke machine, which means we MUST have a karaoke party. It is hilariously bad, with videos that are not the actual videos for the song, but instead seem to have been made my someone wandering around moderately unscenic places, or places that manage to look unscenic on murky camcorder-type film, ocasionally filming a girl with 80s hair bopping (I use the word bopping advisedly - dancing doesn't quite cover it) along to the music and "being sexy". And this morning I discovered that a couple of these videos were filmed in Cambridge, and I was so very cheered to see her. "Angels" is particularly charmingly set to wobbly shots of my dear Cambridge market, my favourite being a close-up of some fen celery and its little price placard. It really fits the imagery of the song, don't you think?]

[None of this negates what I said about my fear and misery over leaving Mexico. It's a bitch leaving pieces of your heart in more than one place.]

* This is the correct personal pronoun for a city. It just is. Like ships and trains and countries. And interestingly, bells: even though bells always have male names (like Big Ben) they are always referred to as "she". Such are the things one learns from Lord Peter Wimsey.