The City of Bells

It’s one of the first things that visitors to the city always comment on, the bells. Our city, just like any other city, has a lot of churches and it seems like every single church in the city has a ring of bells. They ring when someone is married, they ring when someone dies, they ring to call people to mass. Standing on a corner in the city is like standing inside a bell concert, when I was little I used to dream I was inside of a bell, the noise all around me.

“I hate this place,” the man standing next to me said. “I have no idea how you could have grown up in this city. The bells are already giving me a headache.” He looked over at me; I knew he expected me to tell him it was alright that he had just insulted one of my fondest childhood memories. I knew he wanted to be told that we could leave right away, he honestly wanted sympathy. I didn’t say anything; I just looked down the street.

These streets are streets that I have walked down in my mind a thousand times since I left the city. No one knows these streets better then I do. I have traveled around the world and I still have never found streets like these, wide and tree lined, with their skinny sidewalks. They were never paved; they are cobblestone to this day and I have always loved how the horse drawn cabs that you can rent rattle over the uneven stones.

I looked around me, wanting to see even more of the familiar sites and instead caught a glimpse of my companion’s disgusted face, which ruined the image for me. I looked away and closed my eyes. Just being here was enough, I didn’t have to see anything at all, there was a quality to the air, the sounds of the bells blended in with the rest of the noises of the city, the way that people spoke here, the clatter of the horse cabs, everything was relaxing. The smell of the city was the same even, unchanging, as if I hadn’t been away for a decade and for the first time in a decade I finally felt as if I had come home.

People are like plants, I’ve always believed this. Where you have your roots affects everything about you, how you speak, what you eat, what your interests are, and the way that you treat other people. People without roots get tipped over far too easily when buffeted by the world. For me my roots have always been in this city and I felt like I had withered from being away from it for too long. I was drinking greedily now from the place that I had once called home. Now I realized that I had never stopped thinking of it as my home even though I called many other places by that name.

Without saying a word to my companion I started down the street. He is the sort of person who likes to plan everything to its smallest detail and I had no interest in planning for anything, not now. I felt almost as if I was walking on holy land and to plan in such a place seemed sacrilege. I would go where my feet took me and he could follow me or not, that was up to him. There would probably be a fight over this later, I was being selfish and I knew it, but in this place, where he didn’t understand, I couldn’t help but be selfish. I was walking in step to the bells and they moved me forward.

I found myself in the park; even the park has a bell tower though the bells are only rung here for special events like on new years. There was a man selling some of the local treats and a I bought a pastry from him, the comfort food of my childhood. There are some foods that you can only find in one place and even if you do try to reproduce them, as I have, when they are taken from that place they just aren’t the same.

To be continued...