Nicole Smolinksi, Renovations

NICOLE SMOLINKSI

I am a big, tangled mess of confidence and fear all entwined together. Some days I wake up feeling like I’m finally becoming familiar with the world, like I’ve finally lived in the big city long enough to know its streets and shortcuts. Like I’m finally feeling like a local.

Other days, I wake up and think about all the tiny shops I’ve yet to visit and how I still can’t remember the best shortcut through crowded areas.

I feel like a tourist in my own body, and I chastise myself for being back here all over again.

Twenty-five years seems like a long time to get to know a place, to get to know yourself. But stores in big cities change often, and construction redirects your route to work depending on the day, and you could be a local of 25 years in a crowded city and still never be able to predict what will happen.

I’ve been living in my “city-body” for almost 25 years now and I still come across days where I feel like a complete tourist, unsure of myself, my decisions, how my brain and soul work. Sometimes I’m even tempted to wish some shops inside were different.

That maybe I could be less sensitive or more “life of the party.”

That I’d enjoy big, exciting clubs rather than the big, exciting feeling of looking at the expanse in the night sky.

I sometimes wish I could know every street corner of my soul by name and could choose every single shop inside my city.

But we are plastic people who evolve like any smart city will. Character gets tested, and we must reconstruct it like old buildings needing a retouch. We learn more about the world and how we exist in it.

Things change, and we must constantly relearn the back streets of our “city-self.” It is exhausting at times, but I guess that’s the price we pay for living in a vibrant city rather than a stagnant one.

We are confusing, chaotic, vibrant, alive cities—the days we feel more like tourists than locals are not days to feel defeated, they are days to celebrate renovations.