For a lot of the time I was in Berkeley, I was single. I was

In the annals of wandering hearts, a confession like this is both map and mirror: “For a lot of the time I was in Berkeley, I was single. I was living in a kind of collegiate apartment by myself—it was like a protracted summer vacation. So at least in hindsight, I have gloomy emotions attached to Berkeley, whereas I started coming to New York because I was dating someone, and it was very exciting and romantic.” Hear how the two cities are not merely places but climates of the soul. One is sunlight without harvest, the other stormlight that ripens fruit. The saying teaches that geography is braided with memory, and memory is dyed by love.

To be single in a collegiate apartment by myself—the phrase rings with soft emptiness. It is the ease that becomes ache, the room with too much echo. A protracted summer vacation can turn the calendar into warm fog: days unhooked from purpose, afternoons that do not press forward. In the orchard of time, unpruned branches bear scattered sweetness and much shade. Thus the artist looks back and calls it gloomy: not because no light ever touched the floor, but because the light found too few names to bless.

Note how hindsight rearranges the furniture of the heart. We do not remember only what happened; we remember the meaning our later days lend to earlier hours. After love arrives, yesterday’s quiet can look like exile; after purpose appears, old leisure feels weightless. When the storyteller says he “started coming to New York because [he] was dating someone,” he reveals a timeless law: affection magnetizes the compass. The same streets become different under the lamp of expectation; the same rain, heard by two under one umbrella, turns orchestral.

In New York, the words exciting and romantic throw sparks. Love makes a city taller; every stairwell becomes a prologue, every subway a chariot, every lateness a drama. What altered the brick was not the brick but the breath of the beloved. The ancients would say: Eros is an urban planner—he re-zones the spirit, widening narrow lanes into boulevards of possibility. The poet’s feet are the same size; it is the horizon that enlarges.

Consider a life from history that hums this tune. Georgia O’Keeffe, teaching in the wide quiet of Texas, painted in stern solitude—strong work, spare company. Then came New York, and with it Alfred Stieglitz—a city of galleries, rooftop weather, and letters that set the blood to sail. The canvases turned; the colors emboldened. The geography of her days shifted because the geography of her devotion did. The plains were not dishonored by this change; they were the ground that trained her vision. But it was love, and the city braided with love, that poured flame through the loom.

Let the wisdom be carved plainly on the lintel of our days: places hold us, but people light us. Berkeley may be a meadow, New York a mountain; yet meadow or mountain becomes home by the company we keep and the vows we keep to them. Solitude is a noble tutor, but apprenticeship must graduate into gift. If too much of life becomes vacation—protracted, unclaimed—then the heart forgets how to harvest its hours. If love arrives, receive it honestly; let it recruit your feet toward the work and wonder you would not undertake alone.

Therefore, take these actions, simple and stern. When you are single, give shape to your days: anchor them with craft, with service, with thresholds crossed on purpose. If you dwell by yourself, invite fellowship into your calendar—shared meals, shared walks, shared silence that is truly shared. If a place feels gloomy, test whether it is the city or the story you are telling there; plant a new ritual and see if dawn brightens. And when you are dating, steward the exciting and romantic into something durable: make promises you can keep, build projects you can finish, let love be a forge and not merely fireworks. Do this, and you will find that any city—meadow or mountain—can become a temple, because you learned to make a home where your heart is answered.