Author: iSab
-
Phuket
Phuket is the abroad other people bring back — a coast of drowned mountains standing straight up out of the sea, a short crossing I never made.
-
New Orleans
New Orleans is a city built below the water it lives beside, holding a party over its own graveyards, in a heat I would recognise anywhere.
-
Queenstown
Queenstown is the town they built for people who cannot sit still, dropped between a long cold lake and a wall of bare snow mountains.
-
Christchurch
Christchurch reached me as a copy of England sent to the far side of the world — and then I learned the ground had shrugged and broken it.
-
Manila
Manila reached me the way weather reaches you through a shut window — a pressure, a colour of light, a sea at the end of every imagined street.
-
St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg is a city someone willed up out of a swamp and a sentence, and I have been living in the sentence for years without ever buying the ticket.
-
Vienna
Vienna is a capital built for an empire that no longer exists, and I have furnished a whole one of my own without ever buying the ticket.
-
Tokyo
The largest crowd on earth moves through Tokyo in silence, without touching — a strange marvel for a man raised in crowds that press, lean and talk.
-
Rio de Janeiro
I have wanted to stand in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival and see what a city looks like when it hides nothing — I, who hide almost everything.
-
Marrakech
I have wanted to walk into the great square at Marrakech at dusk and learn how much of a city a photograph leaves out — its smoke, drums and heat.
