Places where my soul lives

I spent about 13 hours on a bus this last weekend, so I decided to put every Ryan Adams album on my iPod and play through all of them. I realized we have something in common—a fascination with places. He has at least 10 songs where he talks about the places that have affected him: “Oh, My Sweet Carolina,” “Dear Chicago,” “Tennessee Sucks,” and “New York, New York” are some of them. But my favorite is “The End”:

"Oh Jacksonville, how you burn in my soul
How you hold all my dreams captive
Jacksonville, how you play with my mind
Oh my heart goes back, suffocating on the pines
In Jacksonville"

My fascination with places started in Rome and became consuming in Edinburgh. But I didn’t understand it until London. I tried to define it, understand it, write about it, but as always, found my ability lacking. But I found the answer in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway:

"But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not "here, here, here"; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter--even trees, or barns."

Here’s how I understand the quote: we exist in all the places we’ve touched. But it works the other way too: those places exist in us. We leave parts of our… I don’t know, essence or soul… in the places we go and we carry those places with us afterward. And so to know someone—I mean, completely know them—we would have to see all the same things in the same places at the same time. It’s almost a kind of soulmates, but obviously impossible to fulfill.

The whole deal with places goes deeper than this, though. The place itself seems to have a soul and identity. Rome is a philosophizing old man with a long beard. Edinburgh mystifies me. I've tried to identify it, and this is all I can come up with: It’s identity changes to suit each person, to draw in every unsuspecting visitor until they become fettered to it. Edinburgh is a vampire, a wise old man, a Druid sacrificing naive virgins, a seductress with fiery hair and a black dress. China doesn’t have a clear identity to me yet, but eventually I’ll figure it out.

So I’ve been trying to figure out how China affects my soul and what parts of myself I’m leaving here. Actually, I think I’m leaving the best parts of myself. It’ll live in the people I’ve affected most—my students. But how will China live with me afterward? Maybe China is the place where my soul became strong. Home is where my soul is renewed. Edinburgh is where my soul is mystified. Rome is where my soul is satisfied. I haven’t yet found the place that burns in my soul and captivates my dreams, as Ryan Adams says, but I’m pretty sure that place exists somewhere.