Cities are like people
Confessions of an unfaithful traveller
Remember the first grand personalities you meet? They have a way of engraving themselves on the landscape of your memory. Their sounds, their smell. The way they change as seasons come and go.
Just like with people, you have a different experience with each city. Some become lovers, some lifelong friends, some hold your hand on a late summer evening walk, whereas some won’t even remember you were there.
Some cities are indifferent. They let you be there, but in the end: they don’t care about you. They watch you impassionately as you write your story passing on its broad, impassive streets. Some are kind, some have gone bad. Some want you to leave with the next plane.
Cities exist in time and location. Some have layers of history and hot springs beneath their cobblestone streets. In Rome, it is quite impossible to build subways, because wherever you dig, the city shows you the bare bones of the memories of people who lived there once, and called themselves Romans.
White walls, like skeletons, are exposed to the sun. They remember. The rocks underneath, the hundred-year-old pines stretching towards the infinite sky: they remember.
Old places feel familiar like it were your long-gone memories that lingered in the light breeze. The breeze…
