I love its beautiful summer boulevards, smelling of wet linden trees – romantic, shaded – throwing flocks of warm sunbeams… I love the quiet parks with narrow paths, whispering golden, bronze, and ruby leaves. The noisy and crazy, yet so cozy, city center. Walking on foot from any point to any other point inside the Boulevard Ring. I love this impossible, beautiful, intoxicating cocktail of gasoline, wet trees, and ozone after the rain. I love the transparent and crisp, crystalline air in the cold – when it’s minus ten. I adore the magical, fairy-tale pictures of the world covered with a thick layer of frost, sparkling in the light of street lamps. I love the languid, sexy August heat that exposes bodies and hearts. I love the little houses near the old Arbat, where forgotten tales and domovoi live in the attics.
I love the stained-glass windows of Novoslobodskaya, the Neskuchny Garden, the rainbows from car splashes during a mushroom rain on Prospect Mira, the first sunrays on mother-and-stepmother flowers and the spring streams of living water on the asphalt, breathing with hope for summer, lilies of the valley, those rare sunsets in the most incredible mix of colors, thunderous but not frightening thunderstorms, and those mystical few minutes of darkness and blue-green sky before the storm, early summer mornings – misty, transparent, fragile in their dresses of diamond dew, fluffy red squirrels, the aroma of shashlik and smoky onions at the market, the centuries-old antiquity of Kitai-Gorod, where you can simply always be yourself. And people you can make friends with in five minutes.
My Moscow. All mine, without a trace left behind.
And I am incredibly afraid of returning after seven years in another life. I am terribly afraid that I will never find this Moscow I love so much, this dear Moscow that has rooted itself in my heart.
This is such a raw, honest reflection of your connection to Moscow. The fear of returning to something so beloved, after being away for so long, is incredibly poignant. Yet, perhaps, the very essence of that city remains within you, no matter what.