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Europe came to me early and secondhand — in atlases whose borders were already out of date, in films watched at the wrong speed on a small screen.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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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.
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Istanbul
A man who has never crossed a border, dreaming of the one city that is itself a crossing — where you change continents in the time it takes a tea to cool.
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Venice
No city has been handed to me more often, or visited less. I have owned Venice for thirty years without once paying the fare.
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Zürich
I know Zürich the way you know a word you have read a hundred times and never once heard said aloud.
