Continent: Europe
Europe came to me early and secondhand — in atlases whose borders were already out of date, in films watched at the wrong speed on a small screen. These are the European places I have never stood in, only arrived at on paper.
-
Madrid
A capital set down in the dead centre of nothing, on a high dry plateau far from any sea — Madrid is the one I have furnished out of other people’s light.
-
Milan
Milan is the one Italian city nobody hands you for free — no postcard arrives unasked. I have had to go looking for it, and still have not gone.
-
Barcelona
Barcelona reached me as a cathedral that refuses to be finished — a city I keep building because the men who began it never managed to.
-
Athens
I have known the light of Athens for years and the city not at all — a whole place built, in my head, out of one stubborn rumour about how the evening falls on stone.
-
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.
-
Budapest
Budapest is two cities that married late and kept separate beds — a flat one and a hilly one, with a grey river running down the gap between them.
-
Berlin
Berlin is a city cut in half and stitched back together within living memory — its hardest history left out in the streets rather than shut in a museum.
-
Lisbon
Lisbon is a city of light and tiles at the western edge of Europe — a faded sea-empire that once sailed off the end of the map, and the man who never sailed at all.
-
Rome
Rome is the city half my schoolbooks came from — a living town built on and out of the ancient world, antiquity underfoot among the traffic, never seen.
