Breakfast at Tiffany’s has always been one of my favorite Audrey Hepburn films.
Holly Golightly is such an intriguing character, and I love the sights of 1960s New York City. My favorite part of the whole movie is the beginning when Holly Golightly and her new neighbor Paul Varjak meet.
Paul asks Holly if she just moved in because her apartment is so sparse. Holly replies by telling him that she’s been living there for a year, but she doesn’t want to own anything (including the nameless cat) until she finds a place where she feels like she belongs. She tells him Tiffany’s, the jewelry store, is the only place she feels calm and safe.
“The quietness and the proud look of it, nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a place that felt like Tiffany’s then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.” – Holly Golightly.
This scene in the movie totally describes me right now.
For the last four years, I haven’t made any big purchases like furniture or a new car because I don’t know where I’m going to be tomorrow. That uncertainness has stopped me from making long-term commitments because I don’t want to put down roots until I find a place I belong, like Tiffany’s.
In the movie, Holly Golightly leaves her old life in Texas (similarities? I think so…) to move on to bigger and better things. She describes herself as a wild thing, and as we all know, you can never tame a wild thing.
I may not be as wild as Holly Golightly (I mean she does visit a convicted mobster, Sally Tomatoes, in Sing-Sing every Thursday), but I have the wild thing in me and it makes it hard to settle down.
I feel like I need to move and live all over the world before I can really decide where I call home. I think that when you find a place you love, you will know you belong right away. There have been a few places that I have lived where I knew that I belonged; Chicago and California were two of those places.
But it’s true what they say: you can never go back home because it will never be the same. Things change, and when you leave, you expect to come back to the same place, but you never can because the world is ever-changing. That’s why you have to continue to move forward.
If I moved back to Chicago or California, I would not be returning to my old life because that life doesn’t exist anymore. I would have to start all over again, and if I’m going to do that, I might as well move somewhere new.
I will know I have found my Tiffany’s when I find a place that I don’t want to move from. It may take a while before I stumble upon it, but I’m sure I will find it eventually.
Where is your Tiffany’s? Where is the place you feel like you most belong?
Photo uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons
