The streets breathe an unknown language. I wander without a map, my steps echoing between facades that tell me nothing. The stones seem old, but they carry secrets that I can’t read.
A market is brimming with voices that I don’t understand. Colors flash by: fruit in piles, fabrics that wave in the wind, gestures that are faster than words. I feel included in a stream that takes me along, but leads me nowhere.
The city seems to hide itself behind every corner. A door closes just before I get closer. A window opens, but shows only a shadow. The unknown smiles, but remains elusive.
I walk on, the smell of spices and smoke mixes with the sound of trams and footsteps. It’s as if the city is a labyrinth that doesn’t want to let me escape, but also doesn’t want to hold on to me.
Nobody speaks to me. Only a woman on the corner of the street. She beckons me. Come with me, she says softly, in an almost unintelligible kind of English as I walk past a haze of perfume. Her eyes are bright blue, her skin seems transparent, as if she is wearing a layer of air around her.
“You’re already here. You just forgot,” I hear her say. Then, suddenly, she turns around — and disappears from sight. For a split second, I can still see her silhouette fade, as if she is stepping into an old movie. Then she’s gone. Only the smell of perfume lingers — sweet, but with a metallic undertone, as if it comes from another time.
I enter the alley where the woman seemed to dissolve. Further on, I let myself be carried by the penetrating smell of perfume and look up at facades that are old but still waiting for meaning. Their ornaments seem to exude stories, which disappear unspoken into the air.
For a moment I feel that I am part of something bigger. The unknown becomes a mirror in which I see my own desire. I stop at a crossroads, listening to the chaos that organizes itself into a strange kind of harmony.
I look for a place to sit and find a bench next to a fountain. The water mumbles something in a language older than words. I close my eyes and let the sound envelop me, like a cloak that is not mine but still gives me warmth.
When I open my eyes again, the city is the same, but I am no longer the same. Something has shifted, somewhere deep inside, in a place I can’t pinpoint.
Then I hear those words again… “You’re already here. You just forgot.” The city breathes them along, in trams, in voices, in the splashing of water. And somewhere, almost imperceptibly, there is a tinge in the air — no longer just perfume, but something that resembles memory itself. It mixes with the evening, with the gold and gray of the rooftops, and with the voices that soften.
I walk on, without a destination, but with a new rhythm in my stride. Perhaps the unknown is not to be understood, but to be encountered again and again — like a fragrance that lingers, elusive and yet familiar, an echo of longing that cannot be grasped but continues to float between time and breath.