First semester of senior year is long gone, Christmas is past, and now in a few days I’ll return to Dublin for a good long winter break.

Some of my friends have already been back and said it wasn’t very nostalgic — too soon, perhaps, to really mean anything yet.  I don’t know if I’m looking for nostalgia.  It’s not like going back to high school and saying, “Oh, remember sitting here at lunch?  And you sat there, and she sat there, and I always ate a peanut butter sandwich and Yoo-hoo.”  I won’t be saying, “Aw, I loved coming here.”  It’ll be, “I love coming here.  Is there anywhere else we can go?”

Friends said crossing the Liffey and cutting through Trinity didn’t feel like memory lane, just another day in Dublin.  This disappointed them, but it’s what I want.  I want the next few weeks to be like I never left.  And before I left, I was just living — not thinking about what I would think of things later, but just doing things.  I want to constantly recreate what the city means to me, just like any other day.  I want to hit the old haunts at some point, soak in the familiarity of going down the street for a pint just because, dancing to indie and ironic music at Doyle’s, and dozing off in a Luas seat, but I also want to check out restaurants I haven’t noticed before, explore the outlying districts, and find Iveagh Gardens once and for all.  I’ve spent the last semester staring at my ceiling thinking of everything that happened last year.  It’s high time to paper over old memories with new ones.

It’s a city I know very well, with lots of corners I don’t know at all.  Sorry, Boston, but you’re a city I’ll never know.  You and I are long-standing acquaintances who will never quite get each other.  I can’t learn you, your infrastructure, or the things that matter to you, and you’ll never try with me.  This other place that I’m heading back to, this little city that quietly builds and builds, is calling me back.  It was a pit stop for many, and while it may not be where I’ll forever rest my head, for now it’s where I’ll keep on living.

And in the summer, when I’m through with college and stepping into the first day of the rest of my life, it’s where I’ll go.