As a precocious and lonely fifteen-year-old, I spent three months in the friendly city of Bremen, Germany. This convinced me that the city was where I wanted to live.

For the first time I had autonomy, I could hop on my bicycle and access the whole range of activities that might please a young person. Shopping was in the centre, a quick cycle through outlying streets and through a tunnel under the old city wall. I could coast, no hands, along flat broad pathways through parkland to long lengths of liquid bliss at the university pool. I could find my way, turn by turn, in that place before google maps, to the home of my new friend then attempt halting conversation in my broken German.

Now as I contemplate returning to the small town of my birth, I feel a constricting alongside the excitement – will I still be me if I leave the city?