THE CITY PERSONIFIED

Eyes locked on a tram turned into an essay on living in cities for long enough.

There comes a moment of realization you have lived in a city when you see someone you have met before and you spend a few minutes working out who they are.

It’s not going to be a person you have met at a party or seen for a second in a bar and exchanged a few words. It will be someone with whom you talked in the light of day or at least in a setting that excludes alcohol and speaking louder than usual.

It was Saturday, the last one of June and I sat on a tram 11 going to Victoria Harbour Docklands after work. A bit tired even though I did my best to get 9 hours of sleep. My hands and hair smelled like coffee and ham. The ham from the sandwiches I made and the coffee from the coffee. 

I had been recently trying to exist more in my surroundings, so I was looking at the people coming onto the tram that stops every 2 to 3 minutes on St Georges Rd that then becomes Brunswick St. The tram stopped for the third time when a guy stepped in. 

John Light, a neuro theorist, from Quora (a nicer sister of Reddit I suppose), writes that there are two ways of remembering faces. We store symbolic representations of deconstructed faces in the left hemisphere, keeping those close to us with biographical information about them. The right hemisphere works as a keeper of the facial recognition network. It adds more and more summaries of facial features and works as an extension of the visual processing areas.  

It is a good game to play when you can’t fall asleep to try to remember the minute details of the faces of people you know. Trying to remember whether Mum had a freckle above her left eyebrow, if my history teacher had already grey hair, or was it just in the process of greying. Putting together the things that make faces of my roommates or co-workers; the people I see every day. Sometimes these faces are the hardest to reconstruct with your eyes closed.

And I met this guy. All black with white sneakers that were the perfect amount of new to used ratio, with curly hair and a backpack that was coming off his shoulders just as he was coming onto the tram. We locked eyes.

There could only be a few places I could have met this guy. On campus, at work among all the people I served coffee to, a friend of a friend, someone that served me coffee somewhere. 

Only around 2 months ago, which feels like longer, but time grows in weird ways when you have an expiration date to your stay, I was looking for more work, scared that 2 shifts at the cafe wouldn’t do and I found a job in a restaurant in the city. I don’t like the city. I like it only from far away, its outline on the sky heavy with the metal and glass of the skyscrapers. It reminds me that everything is close by and that I am in a place where things happen, maybe an aftermath of never living in Warsaw, but living close to Warsaw - a place I grew up felt like seeing things happen behind a veil. 

I was walking around Melbourne handing out CVs printed out on thick paper from a printer my roommate had stored in the living room. I made a list of places I wanted to visit and put them on Google Maps trying to make a coherent route that would not involve me making circles, but in the new streets of the city, I was indeed walking in circles. I stood in lines waiting for the customer before me to order to then tell that I was not waiting for a coffee, but wanted to leave my CV. Courtesy smiles, promises, and no answer. There was one place in which a guy, let’s call him Jeff because it was an American-style diner place, told me that sadly they didn’t have a place for me (which by then became the answer I was used to), but he knew a place in the city where they would happily take me in. 

When I was in the city for my Visa appointment - very uneventful, although I did get lost in the very tall building with a weird system for numbering all the floors and offices, it felt like the universe would be mad if I didn’t try going to the restaurant and ask for a job. The universe thing made me go to all the places on the list even if I did not want to because not going somewhere would increase the chances of me not getting the job. That is simply how the universe works.

I could not find the restaurant at first but when I did it was inside a big building that hid other businesses and hotels and there was a lot of space kept inside the building which felt like a waste. Concrete inside concrete and no one to walk it. I talked with the manager, did a trial shift (half-sick), and got the job. Only then did they tell me I always have to walk Fridays and Saturdays (evenings!) which no one disclosed before. Or I just didn’t ask, but there I was employed with the prospect of working all the hours I wanted to work, but I hated the job, so I quit after 2 shifts, which felt equally cinematic and dumb.

after yesterday’s shift I’ve realized that doing evening shifts is not for me anymore, and given that I would have to work both Fridays and Saturdays, the job would not align with my schedule anymore 

I quit mainly because of the schedule issue, which was me wanting to have some kind of life, but it was also because I became a horrible person while working there. 

Maybe it was because the restaurant was inside of a bigger building that made me feel claustrophobic, but I was mean to everyone and everything. The nice dresses, high heels, suits, business meetings that included people wanting more money for the sake of more money, flashlights of phones that took pictures of every meal, and the small talk. I could not handle the small talk, the jokes I had heard in my other restaurant jobs, and the praise for the food I did not make. I did not even try to talk with the other staff, because from the moment I started working there, I knew I would quit after the second shift, but it was exciting and scary to see I could be someone completely different. A person who does not smile, does not engage in conversations, and does not try their best. 

The guy from the tram was one of the cooks. A line cook from the looks of it. He was British, just like the head chef and he was prepping the food when I first came in. He was definitely good looking and if it was my first job when I was 19 I would try to get his attention to feel accomplished (about my looks), but now at 21 I was walking around uninterested although still very much so thinking about my looks. I remember thinking he was not British, up until he opened his mouth, but maybe French, which now writing this I know would be taken as an offense from both nations. 

And that’s all I know about the guy. We worked together for 2 days. We probably shared a few sentences and told each other our names that I have since forgotten and our jackets laid together but in different lockers in the staff room when we worked in a job I assume he liked and I hated. 

But I remembered him and he became one of the people I met in Melbourne. That’s how you grow into a city. Of course, you make friends and of course, it is them you spend your time with. But it is equally all the people you don’t spend time with that make the city. And if you remember them, it means you have been somewhere long enough. 

From November 2022 to June 2023, so for eight months, I worked as a Gifts Coordinator in a startup, which by then had already moved onto the scaleup territory (this millennium's favorite words).

Gifts Coordinator is a big name for a small job which was me printing out gift cards for people who were lovely enough to buy their relatives or friends a nonphysical present like a flight ticket or a hotel stay. On my 4-hour shifts, I would log into the laptop, ensure the quality of the product (look for typos and emojis that the system would not recognize and leave a black square instead), print all the gift cards out, pack them, and go to the post station on Vijzelgracht and try to say a few words in Dutch, which usually did not work. 

I would take the same route from Hereengracht to the post office. I walked slowly, as my position, although weirdly well paid was not the most important one so my absence for 15 minutes longer would not alarm anyone. The route would stay the same and my leaving time from the office would be similar - around 3 pm, since the post office would close around 4. 

As I did the walk for the n-th time I started to realize I was passing the same faces, not every day and every time, but nonetheless, more than once I saw the same guy passing the crossing to go back to the coworking space (this millennia’s short-lived third place), and more than once did I see a woman walking her dog in the exact same spot. And that, as the guy in the tram, made me feel like I was becoming a part of a city. 

As much as I would like to say I would love to live by myself in the hut in the woods, I am still mesmerized by cities and the volume of people around. It is the reason I keep moving around and when considering a new place to live in I still go for the big cities. Seeing faces I recognize only because I saw them in the same spot weeks ago and realizing they have their own set of faces they see makes me feel smaller in a good way. It positions me as a background to someone else's life rather than the position I usually consider myself from - me as the center of everything. And that is good because I am most definitely not the center of everything. 

On one of my last days in Amsterdam which would be the last week of January 2024, I took the tram to my old cafe to say goodbye to my boss Patrick and I glanced over someone biking. It was a guy I met through an internship I did during my first year of university, which also took place on Hereengracht, a street where I would end up having three jobs on. The first year internship was bad, so bad I will only mention the way the boss would eat lunch. 

We would usually get Asian takeaway from a place called Asian Kitchen where they used to serve very cheap food (6.5€ for an egg and vegetable noodles), which they later raised to 10.5€, and that broke my heart. The boss would usually get the shrimp noodles and when we ate all together around the table back in the office he would put the whole packet of the hot oil into the noodles and then would proceed to visibly sweat. That always ruined the rest of my day's work. The small streams of sweat sliding down his temples. 

The guy on the bike was a graphic designer we met when we visited a marketing agency hired to work on our brand identity, which quietly crushed my hopes of having anything to do with marketing for the company (I got hired as a marketing intern). That was before I realized I would be doing customer service almost exclusively for the 2 months of the internship. Alongside watching my boss sweat. 

The guy on the tram sat still as I walked out of my stop. He must have been going to work. He will prep food and serve it and take the tram again and maybe our schedules will align. If they do and we sit again on the same tram that stops along Brunswick Street I won’t do more than a smile or a nod to acknowledge that I do remember him. Not a friend, not an acquaintance but a city personified.