Recently, I’ve been treating Philly like some dead-beat boyfriend. When everyone else is singing the city’s praises, I’m singing Miss. Jackson’s, What have you done for me lately.

We’ve always been in a love/hate relationship. When it’s good, it’s great & when it’s bad, it’s horrible. I’ve threatened to leave a handful of times, never actually following through but coming damn close.

Philly and its crew has done me dirty countless times. PPA has stolen hundreds of dollars from me… PGW has stolen thousands. Septa has stood me up more than once and Comcast likes to play stupid mind games and shut off in the middle of my On Demand movies. The degree of separation in this small-town city is basically 1% and it seems that I can’t go anywhere without running into someone that I don’t want to.  Like any good abusive relationship though, I keep getting sucked back in.  

It’s those times when the weather is perfect and sitting at Penns Landing feels like my personal vacation destination. The mornings that I see the Septa driver from my Temple days that still knows me by name. When my Brooklyn friends complain about money and I feel like the luckiest girl ever spending 1/3 of what they do for rent. Or when out of nowhere, there’s a carnival in the middle of Broad Street.

So I tell myself that maybe we can work things out, it might get better, we can try and go back to the way things were in 2002 when we were in love. So I’ll give it a few more months, and then if it’s really over, I’ll really leave and we can just be friends.

City hall & a ferris wheel go together like peanut butter & jelly.