Dear New Bern,

You are a place full of firsts. You were the first place I traveled to with only my love, on an impromptu day trip, with only a roadmap and word-of-mouth suggestions to guide us. You were the first place to which we escaped during our craziest semester of college; a little beacon of freedom, bobbing in the sea of essays and senior assignments. You were our chance to temporarily forget our schoolyard worries...and you ended up being so much more.

I've always been one to fall in love with intangible things; little moments in time, floating around the air like fireflies on murky summer nights. This doesn't exclude places, either, and as soon as I began roaming your streets, looking up at your historic buildings and waltzing around storefront after storefront, I knew it wouldn't take long for me to become infatuated with you.

It was like you were sculpted for my boyfriend and me, handmade to fit our every interest and all of the quirks that make us who we are. This isn't true, of course, but the little bears sprinkled around the streets, and the way that it felt eerily like a small mountain town despite being right on the river, was enough to convince me otherwise. You're a place for the artist in both of us, with your architecture and your poetry. You're a place for us to sprawl out on blankets in the shade, and study flowers while we write out novels in our notebooks.

There's no way you weren't meant for us to explore.

We came alive in your streets, taking pictures and laughing over every little thing. We were tourists for that first day, unapologetically, and every time we've visited you again, we've learned more about your rich history and spent more time exploring what we hadn't yet discovered.

New Bern, you were the first place we ever visited as a couple, and subsequently, the first place we've ever saved up to explore again. You're the first place we ever ventured out to, and then brought others to see for themselves; showing them all the spots we'd discovered in the past, and corralling them into photo-ops with statues and flowers. I kept every little piece of you that I could, and pasted it into my journals. I still have pages filled with polaroids in front of bear statues, and doodles of flowers in front of ornate statues in the palace gardens.

I have never felt such a connection to a place before. Out of all the places I've traveled to and loved, you were an experience unlike any I had lived through before. All of this is to say thank you, New Bern, for being the first place my boyfriend I could day trip to. You will forever hold a special place in my heart, and you will always be worth the travel time to get to you.

Love, Anna.