On Falling (Back) in Love with Detroit

Or, a first dispatch from my long-lost hometown

It’s a thrilling time to be around Detroit right now. The skyline is lit up with Honolulu blue lights, there’s a crackling current of hope warming the winter air, and anyone who fell off the Lions bandwagon at some point during the rough years is scrambling to get their hands on piece of gear to show their newfound pride. There’s no point in pretending I stayed on the bandwagon all the years I was away (anyone who knows me offline knows an ex converted me to an Eagles fan for a while), but at least I hopped back on early enough to get an only-slightly-oversized Lions t-shirt during the Wild Card round.

Beaufait Street, Detroit, November 2023

I moved from metro Detroit to Washington, DC in 2009, when the Lions were coming off an 0-16 season. There was a fleeting moment of glory when they broke what was then the third-longest losing streak in NFL history against the Washington R*******, but it faded by the following Sunday. When I told people at college I was from outside Detroit, I usually heard something about the Lions, but it was impossible to avoid the undertone that it wasn’t just about the Lions; it was about the abandoned buildings and urban decay, the GM bankruptcy, the crime rate, rumors the city itself would go bankrupt, or, in a worst case scenario, the viral song, “It’s So Cold in the D” by T-Baby. By sophomore year, I got tired of yelling at people about how fucked up it was to mock a DIY music video made in honor of someone who literally fucking died, and stopped volunteering where I was from. And by the time I left DC, over 13 years later, I’d been there so long, I forgot what it was like to have another hometown at all.

How does Detroit fit into my story now? To be honest, I’m still figuring it out. I’ve been back here a little less than a year, and even though it’s my hometown, Detroit feels like a brand new city. My friends from high school have mostly moved away, so I don’t have that rom-com experience of running into exes I haven’t seen since I was 17. I didn’t drink (or, perhaps more accurately, didn’t get invited out drinking) much back then, so my “old haunts” are diners and strip malls, not dive bars and techno clubs. And the contours of the city have changed so much, I struggle to recognize places I’ve been going since I was a kid, let alone who I am in them today.