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Europe came to me early and secondhand — in atlases whose borders were already out of date, in films watched at the wrong speed on a small screen.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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Amsterdam
Amsterdam is a city built below the sea and held at a tilt — ring canals, leaning gabled houses, bicycles past counting. I dream of all that cool water from the hot plains.
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Paris
The most pictured city on earth, the world’s default dream of elsewhere — I have seen Paris ten thousand times and not once. Saturation is its own distance.
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Reykjavík
I was born into heat and crowd, so the place I dream of hardest is the emptiest one: Reykjavík, a bright little town at the rim of the world under far too much sky.
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London
The foreign city I know best without ever seeing it — read my whole life in a borrowed language I made my own. I write even this in the tongue it sent us.
