It’s as if the city is trying to change my mind. Or as if it already knows it can’t, and just wants to be remembered well.

I’ve moved to cities to study, to work, to chase something, sometimes for only three months for one project. And every time, I arrive feeling like a stranger, like a student who changes schools in her teenage years and can’t adapt for the rest of it, until she graduates. The streets belong to people who know where they lead. The shopkeepers have regulars, and I am not one of them, the way every teacher at the new school already has her favorite students. Everyone is in the middle of their story, and I have come in on the wrong page. Sometimes it’s worse than feeling out of place.

And then, without asking my permission, it begins. Love never asked permission, though.

I learn which street is the shortcut. I make a route, and the route becomes a routine, and a routine is a quiet agreement with a place: I’ll be here tomorrow, and so will you. The unfamiliar things don’t disappear. They move to the background, where they stop being strange and start being mine.

There is always a small bed. A small bed in my room, nothing special, and somehow it becomes my favorite thing in the whole city. Sometimes I stay in that house, in that city, just because of this bed. The window beside it, and the flower I just received from my crush. And I guess now this city is giving me a reason. It’s being very generous.

There is always a special coffee they make in that city, and it becomes my favorite, until I change the city. Then there’s a new coffee, and it becomes my favorite. What a betrayal.

There are the trees I once talked to, that know all my secrets, the ones too heavy for my mom. There is my favorite cigarette shop, where old women sit and sell books and cigarettes at the same little table, as if nobody ever told them those two things belong in different shops. Maybe nobody should. And maybe they do belong in the same shop. And if she made coffee as well, oh, what a brilliant marketing idea.

There is no morning when I wake up and decide to love the place. The only evidence comes later, and it is small and a little embarrassing. One day I give a stranger directions without thinking. One day I’m annoyed at a tourist for walking slowly on my street. My street.

What a toxic relationship, as if the city should belong only to me. Recently I heard that another Uzbek girl visited Antep, and I turned red. I couldn’t imagine my friends loving her as they loved me, or sharing their stories and their jokes with her as they did with me. I do it to other people, though. I tell my best jokes to at least six different men, to make each one feel he’s special. But Antep, how could you?

I sometimes felt like an alien in Bishkek. A perfectly legal one, with every right to be there, and still. I kept thinking of Sting’s “Englishman in New York,” a man who is an alien in New York. Except I wasn’t an Englishman in New York. I was a girl from Qarshi in Bishkek, asking for help and hearing the same answer.

No.

That’s what I remember first. No. Can you go to the shopping mall with me? No. Can you lend me some money? No. If you have free time, we can hang out. I don’t have free time this week. And not a single sorry. Every no arrived alone, without sorries and explanations.

In Qarshi we never did that. We never said no to each other, not when we didn’t want to, not when we didn’t have the time, not when we didn’t have the resources. You said yes first and figured out how later. I always said yes when I was invited to birthday parties, even when I didn’t want to go, because it could hurt my friend. Or because I thought I was so important that my friend would notice I’d missed her birthday, with fifty other people invited.

So at first I took every no personally, because where I come from, it would have been personal. Then slowly I started accepting it. And then, the part I didn’t expect, I started doing it myself. Apparently you can say no. Apparently you can say no and the friendship survives. Apparently your time belongs to you, and you don’t have to apologize for keeping it. I learned the word boundaries in my twenties, finally, from a city that didn’t seem to like me very much. For the first time in my life, I said no to the shopping mall, and I didn’t feel bad for saying it. I became one of them. Not completely. Enough that when I say no now, without a sorry, there is a little Bishkek in my mouth.

Then there was Bali, for a month.

At first I used an air drier, not a humidifier, because in Bali the air has more water in it than it needs. I loved eating rice and papaya, and after two weeks I hated it. A month is long enough for that. It is also long enough for much more.

I loved my nun. She owned the NGO where I volunteered, a woman in her eighties who walked barefoot, talked with dogs, and did not let men into the school. It was a life I could never have dreamed of. Not because I didn’t want it. Because I didn’t know it was allowed: that you could be eighty and barefoot and speak to dogs as equals and decide for yourself who comes through your gate.

The people around her were Ananda Marga, with their own beliefs and their own words. Baba Nam Kevalam. Love is the essence of everything. For a long time it was my tattoo idea. And I can’t agree more.

I was happy snorkeling, in that complete way where you forget you have a past at all. I saw turtles, and Nemo, for the first time. And there was Sara, my most lovely unplanned thing. I came for a solo trip; we met through Worldpackers, became roommates, and the solo trip turned into a friendship trip. I still miss her, from time to time. The way she pronounced my name, “Sug’eyya,” with a French accent.

A month. That’s all it was. I can’t say it doesn’t count.

And here is my problem. There was also Myrtle Beach. Oh, what a whore I am. Three months in the US, and somewhere in those three months I made a promise: I am never going to love another city like you. And I was right. I never loved another city the way I loved Myrtle Beach.

But I loved others. Sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes in a very different way, the way I once loved a man. Isn’t this cheating? On Bishkek? On the US? I spent my whole three months there, I made a promise, and then I went and fell for papaya and a barefoot nun and a girl named Sara.

So may God forgive me for loving too many.

We’re taught that love should have one winner. One person at the end, the great one, and everyone before becomes a lesson, a mistake, a stepping stone toward the real thing. If you loved before, either it wasn’t really love, or you did it wrong.

I’m not sure I believe that about cities anymore. I’m starting to suspect I don’t believe it about people either. But that’s another Substack essay, my dear reader.

What I can say about the cities is this. Leaving one never reached back and undid what I felt there. The love happened at a particular table, in a particular bed, under particular trees. My leaving is a fact about the future. The love is a fact about the past. I don’t understand why we let the first one rule over the second.

And still there’s guilt. I keep trying to find where it comes from.

Maybe it’s because loving a place means saying: here, this, I could stay. And then not staying. Every city I loved, I left with something unclosed. An unfinished love. A coffee shop I’d only just found. A person I’d known for three hours. The city held out its best sunset, and I got on the plane anyway.

Or maybe it’s simpler, and more embarrassing. Somewhere I learned that real love is supposed to cost something, that you prove it by fighting, by staying, by suffering a little. I never paid for any of these cities. I didn’t fight for them. I bought a ticket. And the love was real anyway.

Ironically, I don’t miss them all at the same time. I miss them according to my mood.

I miss Bishkek more on a rainy night, in a car, with a guy. I miss Myrtle Beach on a night that isn’t rainy, in a car, with a guy. And Bali on rainy nights and not-rainy nights both, but on a bike, with a guy. They never compete, because they never come at once.

That’s the only proof I can give. If the cities could speak, if they gathered somewhere and asked me why I’m a cheater for loving all of them, I would say: you’re different, as a man once said to me. And I could explain. And they would listen. They would blindly trust me, the way I once did.

I hear it as I write it. You’re different. I know what it is to be on the other side of an explanation like that: listener, believer. Now I’m the explainer, and I mean every word, and I don’t know what to do with that.

People ask whether a place you lived in for three months, or one month, can really be home. My answer is yes. It has always been yes. I can’t argue for it properly. I only know I had a key, and a bed I would have stayed for, and a little table where old women sold books and cigarettes.

I have never gone back to any of them. Not once. So far, at least.

And I’ve never known how to end a city. I just leave, usually in the middle of something: a coffee I only just found. I never stay for the last sentence.

I’m in Tashkent now. I haven’t been here long, but I’ve already found my new coffee shop, again. Just recently, on a Sunday morning, I said: thank God this coffee shop exists, the best coffee I’ve ever tried. I said it once in every city I’ve been to. But I mean it every time. You know that, right?

So I’ll stop here, in the middle, the way I always do.

So far, at least.