This, perhaps, is too simple, but I will say it all the same: complicated things are better than simple things, or at least, complicated impressions are better than simple impressions. This extends to relationships: the relationship you have with your waiter is a simple one, or with your barber, or your mechanic. The expectations and terms are set. The relationship you have with your mother, or the grandfather who you never see, or your aunt-by-marriage with the bad politics, these are relationships that live in the ether of unpredictability, of in-definition, and these are the relationships that are real. This extends to places as well: the places we visit and love are good. Paris is historic, Tokyo is stimulating, Florence is majestic. They are objectively outside of you, and the things outside of us will always retain a patina of unknowing, and therefore allure. We love the things we ourselves are outside of, because what we love is actually the idea of a thing.

However, these are relationships that are simple, and uncomplicated, and for which the terms are clear from the onset: we are here to be impressed, and the assumption is that we will be wooed. Our relationship with the place from which we are from is not so simple. It is complicated, and glorious, and painful, and sentimental, and violent. We are as unable to tear these places from our inner-selves as we are able to dissect our heart from our chest and still remain alive. The veins and arteries between ourselves and our geographies, our birth-geographies, are fused into an inalienable mass that no matter how far we wander away, we are still attached by something that we cannot dissolve and still remain ourselves.