Geographically promiscuous – the sex appeal of places

Cities, chemistry and the language of locational love.

Lately, I've been thinking about the seduction of certain places. How some cities look at you in half-lidded desire – purring in possibility. How the chemistry between someone and a location can be palpable. Round enough to pluck and sink your teeth into. As sexy as eating a plum. Kissing in quiet libraries. Moving collarbones. The soap scent of skin.

I can't really say I know this intimately, most of my life I've found myself living in lacklustre places. Places I had no chemistry with. Places that didn't feel like recognition. The reasons why it didn't work can be as complicated as the complexities of human love. Mismatched desires, broken histories, betrayals, stagnancy, change. Sometimes it's more like an energetic rejection. You can say about a city what you can say about a date – it's just not there. You can say about a city what you can say about a breathless love – it burnt out. You can say many things about places that could, in a swift moment of misunderstanding, be interpreted as being about another human.

I can recall only two places I truly fell in love with. One, here in Australia, that felt like laying eyes on a warm friend. Leafy and romantic like a dingy old bookshop with yellowed leaves on its doorstep. Rickety cafés, those fast food golden arches for long, drunken nights of fries and snorting laughter. Blue-eyed boys, screen door longings, my very first iPhone. Summers were cooled by the canopy of droopy trees. On the sidewalks, daisy bushes lounged in the heat. Here I learnt to like the taste of coffee (if only with three sugars heaped in), rode around on a vintage green bicycle and finally slipped from the grip of my small hometown. This quaint little half-city coaxed me out into the world. I felt the breath of possibility. I felt awake to what life could become. I still go back sometimes. As soon as I get out of my car my shoulders drop. Every reunion is the same. A sigh. I missed you. I'm glad you're back.

But my love at first sight, my love at first feet on the tarmac, was somewhere far from home, across those big slabs of ocean; 13,569 km to be exact (or 8431 miles). Studded amongst the Aegean Sea lives Skopelos, a small Grecian island draped in Mediterranean charm. I can recall all of it, fully-formed, completely fleshed out, in my minds eye. The sun-sharpened scent of pine, sweeping olive groves, that sweet heat smell of ferry petrol and ocean water. Magenta bougainvillea shaggy with heat; its branches fainting over the walls like renaissance women. The soft apricot villa we stayed in at the end of a street. Floppy grass growing out of tilted sidewalks. The tang of tzatziki, the tang of Ouzo. My tongue, my nose, my skin, all reacting in unison. Even in memory, I'm sensually rapt.

Stepping foot into the Skopelos port was like a dream. A dream of light and awakening and sea-foam. My skin crackled at the sight, each pore singing a hymn of complete-ravenous-openness. The sunlight glinting from passing cars, a memento I've kept for all these years. Smiling like a complete maniac was my daily look. Forget lipstick, I wore unashamed thrill in the shade glee.

How could I have lived so many years, in so many places, and never known this kind of euphoria? How could I love this faraway place I had only just met? Ten seconds in and I was ready to dump my then-boyfriend for a place. If pushed far enough, I would have made out with every white-washed wall I could. Legs, loving, the whole shebang. I didn't – the police station wasn't on my list of must do things in Greece.

In places that agree with me, that pull me out of myself, I feel a vibrancy. An eroticism. A newfound sexiness that swirls around my hips and my feet. Though, not a sexiness attached to attractiveness, but something home-like. The thrill of recognition. Some reconnected sensuality to the heartbeat of living. In places that I have chemistry with, I can't help but exude presence. Become it. The streets around me lure me out of my head and into the belly of existence. Legs no longer feel like legs, they feel like pathways. Pathways to mystery, to experiences, to unravellings.

Although, I do have to admit what stirs me the most is not the places I've already loved, but the ones I'm yet to visit. Call it geographically promiscuous – I can't help but blush rosy in the direction of cities who wink at me from afar.

Unseen places feel similar to that anticipatory period that wobbles between girlhood and adulthood. The feeling that life will be yours soon. Sex will be had. Love will be felt. Wine can be bought. I feel the same way towards cities, places, and skylines I'm yet to visit.

Instagram therapists have done well at convincing us that chemistry is a red flag. Chemistry now carries with it a shameful badge of red. A warning that it cannot be trusted. And I understand – it's a dog-fight of complex human emotions out there. But I can't agree that chemistry deserves the scarlet letter; because the warmest (healthiest) bone-touching love of my life is peach-ripe with chemistry. Take our craft away, let us talk in skin or eyelashes, and things whistle and wail and explode. A cola bottle shaken up. Then there's the chemistry between people and the dreams they tuck under their ribs. The chemistry between readers and writers. Musicians and the human ear. The sun and I. And the unmistakable, burning chemistry between people and the places they find themselves in love with.

Paris. Los Angeles. Rome. The big, voluptuous glamour crushes. The ones who are so irresistible, so seductive, they effortlessly seduce thousands of us. Other places are more selective. Intimate. Personal. They seem unassuming at first but slowly, as you exist in their atmosphere, you get to know each other. Eat crumbly blueberry pastries in its parks. Ponder the glow of its streetlights when the skies bruise purple. Lean into its shoulder. Live stories in its embrace. Come to see just how good you feel wandering its streets. Its veins. This kind of chemistry is slow, quiet, and like certain kinds of love, can happen without us really knowing. One day you wake up and realise you're completely infatuated. The chemistry so full of flame, you could smoke it.

I love the love people have for places. To read of a strangers experience with a place gives me a certain kind of pleasure. The butterflies in their feet, the deep sigh, dilated pupils, some visceral longing bubbling up from below – I recognise it, I breathe into it. I feel a kinship towards the locationally obsessed. Like they know of a love, a passion, that is seemingly invisible to most. It feels like a secret language between the cities and those that love them.

Right now I'm living somewhere I don't love; have never loved, will never love – but I can hear echoes calling to me from afar. Whispers on the wind. Places that roll my name on their tongues in just the right way. I've been scrolling Condé Nast Traveler, flipping through travel memoirs and bookmarking the written affairs of women and Paris. My browser looks like a foreign itinerary. The only thread being that the sun reflects on car bonnets differently there. Like airy gold, butter yellow, a haze, a smog, possibility. Most of the time those around me don't really understand the affair nature of cities. They don't know the language. How this love curves upwards at the end.

So I've taken to the Internet.

I've stuck it on my chest like a love note. A broadcast. A scarlet letter altered. Hoping if I put language to it, others might recognise what's often overlooked. That they might recognise the dialect of loving a city on their own tongue, and speak it back to me.

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