The Curtain's Secret

Through the breath of the night’s wind, enclosed by the slow respiration of the city, the curtain—the faded sentinel of civility—stirs almost imperceptibly. Not from air, but from memory itself. Beyond the square, a solitary bird calls; in this London night, it might be a dove, it might be a hawk. Darkness admits no distinctions. Peace and violence, once separate and noble adversaries, now merge into one dim hue, a grey neither cruel nor kind. Thus London presents itself: neither creature of purpose nor of repose, but a procession of winged shadows, half-formed and hesitant, passing through the smoke of centuries.

The navy blanket across the knees folds itself into small, uncertain ridges—a miniature landscape, both mountain and sea. Its weight comforts and confines, like the gravity of thought. The folds undulate with a strange consciousness, as though they share in the pulse of London beyond the window: the tap of distant horses, the faint rattle of a milk-cart along wet cobbles. Thoughts rise and fall in concert. They are mountains that recall the rhythm of the sea, waves that harbor the memory of rock. What trembles beneath is not the earth’s rebellion, but the cup upon the saucer, the city’s subtle shiver coursing through porcelain.

The air smells of rain upon old brick—a scent particular to London, ancient and incorrigible, drifting through the crescent of Russell Square. It clings to the throat, mingling with the tang of coal and iron, the faint ghosts of chimneys that have long since ceased their work. Such odors anchor one to existence, tender as a mother’s hand upon the restless child. They persuade the soul to remain where reason might urge departure, reminding one that even decay possesses its own sanctity.

Language, that subtle conspirator, performs its quiet transmutation upon experience. It takes what is brutal—the flayed hide of reality—and renders it supple, turning wound into coastline, cruelty into contour. Thus we civilize despair, coating it in the varnish of grammar, and call it beauty. It is the ancient compact between suffering and expression: that the one ennobles the other. This is the fee exacted from those who linger through the long vigil before dawn.

Presently, London will resume its endless liturgy. The papers will rustle through letter-boxes. Milk-cans will rattle along slick pavements. The bells of St. Clement’s will toll, serenely indifferent to both the glory and the futility of their own endurance. I shall greet the morning as one greets a courteous adversary: with composure, with hope, with a faint, guarded esteem.

Elsewhere, the farmers bring their harvests to market, proud of tangible proof of labor, of earth coaxed into bounty. I too must bring something to that invisible marketplace where thought meets thought. My offering is less tangible: a few sentences, distilled from solitude, consecrated by silence. They may nourish no man; yet in them I confess that I have lived, and watched, and wondered beneath this ever-breathing sky.

After I died, I made coffee...

After I died, I made coffee. Not the bitter draught brewed in haste, but a fragrance rising — steam twining upward, carrying no demand, no fear. I floated, and it was not the anxious hovering of a ghost but a wide, calm drift, as though borne by a tide older than time. The weight of marrow and muscle was gone; I was husk and air together, lifted and free. Below me moved the man who had worn my shape, the pilgrim who had trudged, asking always, waiting always. His chest no longer thudded with its obstinate drum. Silence came — but silence not as absence, rather as an opening, a still meadow where wind and light meet without struggle.

This letting go — not theft, but gift. I felt the knot slacken, the rope of years unspools. The vastness, once terrifying in its indifference, opened now like a welcome, arms spread. The drumbeat of disappointment, the obstinate pounding against closed doors, stilled; and in the stillness I heard another music — not struck, but given, as if silence itself were tuned to kindness.

Then the world, began to offer back its small things, one by one, as though each had been kept aside for me. A cup gleamed, and not with the glare of duty but with the soft shine of promise. A spoon resting on a saucer — how patient it had been, waiting to be more than metal, to be shimmer and curve and invitation. The cadence of a comment, once sharp, now carried laughter hidden in its folds, like a tide pulling joy in after long recession. Even the pattern of a hand — fingers curled, opening — arrived not as memory’s pang but as gift, returned with tender insistence: here, take this, it was always yours.

And as these particulars gathered, not hurried but unfolding like ripples widening on still water, I felt myself entered by their generosity. Each thing that had once been denied or diminished — the withheld glance, the silenced word, the locked door — now returned in altered form, not reproachful but abundant, saying: I was never gone, I was waiting for this moment of recognition.

So the air thickened with offerings: the gleam of porcelain, the quiet creak of wood beneath a shifting chair, the light caught in dust as if each particle were a lantern. They came without clamor, without demand, each detail swelling into more than itself, like shells that hold oceans. My seeing, which in life had been thin, grasping, was now widened, patient; I could wait for each object to speak its name, to sing its small note into the widening chord. And the chord grew, not dissonant but weaving, each thread of perception a kindness, a pulse.

From this pulse, from this deep weaving of cup and hand and light and dust, rose the larger form, inevitable as mist that thickens into tower. Out of particulars the vastness shaped itself, and there, luminous, suspended, stood the castle — not abrupt, not alien, but the flowering of all those humble gifts. Its turrets held the color of dawn, its stones veined with the glow of the cup, the spoon, the hand. It was grandeur distilled from intimacy, immensity drawn from the smallest particulars returned to love.

I entered not as stranger but as long-expected guest. The gates swung wide, not clanging but sighing, a sigh of relief. The courtyard stones glowed with the same moonlight I had seen lodged in porcelain; each step was received, cushioned, folded into the rhythm already pulsing in the walls. Arches rose and parted like waves cresting and subsiding. Windows caught fragments of radiance, not from elsewhere but from here, from the air itself, as if the world at last revealed its hidden circulation of light.

Inside, carpets shimmered like rivers slowed into rest. Columns swelled into vaults where constellations trembled — not painted, not far, but leaning close, like old friends listening. Vastness did not dwarf me; it answered me, as though every chamber had waited with patience, holding its breath until I arrived. Each hall, though immeasurable, curved inward with intimacy: grandeur and nearness braided, the immense and the tender reconciled.

Then — another ripple, larger yet sprung from the same source — the staircase. It unfurled upward, stone broad and luminous, carrying the quiet pulse higher. At its summit a figure: a child, small yet radiant, still as the stillest hour. He was no stranger. He was myself, distilled, the child I had once been, yet more: a vessel of composure, of calm. His gaze met mine not with surprise but with recognition, as if he had been waiting all along in the highest chamber of the house built from all my days.

“There you are,” he said.

The words did not bind me to regret; they did not seek to console. They sounded like truth spoken at last, clear as a bell whose tone quivers in the chest. And hearing them, I felt the years fold, the ache dissolve — not into nothing but into radiance, the way rain dissolves into soil to make it green. Love arrived not as a sudden blaze but as weather, gentle and steady, soaking me through. I knew then: the voyage had not ended but widened; the wandering had been arrival all along.

And I ascended, step by step, into the stillness that was also music, into recognition that was also joy.

Over Tea and Sherry

James: You make light of it, but the days truly did pass faster this summer. One scarcely noticed the mornings, for they were gone almost at once—dissolved in the clatter of trains, in the shuffle of paper, in that quiet tyranny of the desk. Is it not strange that, when I was a boy, summers seemed to swell like Homeric epics—every day a long voyage, every evening a discovery?

Violet: My dear, if I may be perfectly frank, you are in danger of drowning in your own metaphors. You describe a train timetable as though it were the fall of Troy. Believe me, no one in history has ever died of early mornings and clerical work, though I suspect many have died of boredom listening to men complain about them.

James: Perhaps. But I cannot help how the city weighs on me. The sky itself appeared a theater, its clouds cavorting with the grandeur of gods. Yet now, in London, the sun scarcely lingers; it peers over chimneys and sooty eaves, then vanishes, as though ashamed of our unyielding industry.

Violet: Oh, for heaven’s sake. The sun is not sulking—it’s setting. Get a grip.

James: What becomes of time when one’s life is measured out not in adventures but in ledgers, not in battles fought but in hours sat? Childhood summers—those great symphonies of cricket on the lawn, salt upon the lips at Brighton, the reckless leap into rivers—stand now like marble statues in the gallery of memory.

Violet: And how very marble they must be, since you’ve carved them with such insufferable detail. James, dear, childhood seemed long because you were too small to reach the clock. Time has not betrayed you—you’ve simply noticed it exists. A shocking revelation, I’m sure, but not one that requires a Homeric lament.

James: Still, I sometimes believe those memories stir when I am not looking—that if I were to turn suddenly I might catch the stone boy lifting his bat again, or see the carved swimmer fling himself into some hidden tide.

Violet: Good heavens. Now even your statues are more active than you.

James: But I feel it keenly. London itself conspires. Its shadows are never empty. One hears laughter rising from Kensington Gardens, echoing long after the children have gone. Couples drifting along the Embankment might be lovers—or merely semblances of lovers, repeating steps from long-forgotten evenings. I, meanwhile, remain indoors, bent over figures that mock the very notion of eternity.

Violet: Conspires? London? My dear boy, London cannot even manage drainage without catastrophe. The city is not plotting against you; it is ignoring you entirely—which, frankly, is the only sensible course of action. You imagine shadows whispering and gardens brooding because you cannot endure the fact that the world continues quite happily without consulting you. And as for your ledgers mocking you—well, I don’t doubt they do. If I were a column of numbers condemned to your company, I should laugh too, though perhaps more out of despair than amusement. You speak as though eternity is mocked by your desk. I assure you, eternity has never heard of you, your desk, or your dreary summers. The Thames will go on glittering long after you’ve finished sulking into your inkpot, and the city’s children will keep laughing without pausing to see if James has managed to finish balancing his accounts or penning his latest tragedy about a sunny day. You’re not the victim of a conspiracy, James—you are the victim of your own tedium. And I assure you, no one else is suffering from it half so much as I am at this very moment.

James: That is cruel, Violet—even for you. I may be guilty of melancholy, but I am not some useless idler. If I dwell on the weight of London, it is only because it presses so heavily upon me. Summer, once a sovereign, is reduced here to a whisper through an open window, the scent of plane-trees mingling with petrol fumes.

Violet: Then shut the window. Or better still, go through it.

James: You dismiss me, I know, but there is truth in it. Perhaps there is consolation in this brevity. If joy cannot be prolonged, neither can despair. We must learn to find our summers in the small intervals: a shaft of sunlight upon the Thames, the toll of St. Paul’s, the rare evening when the sky deepens to that impossible blue.

Violet: Oh, James. You speak of intervals as though they were treasures, yet you squander every one of them rehearsing your obituary for the weather. You could have had three walks, two conversations, and at least one tolerable glass of sherry in the time it took you to describe the Thames like some moody oracle. Life is not withholding beauty from you—you are hiding from it, sulking like a boy at the edge of the playground. For heaven’s sake, do something before your grand adventure becomes nothing more than a very long whimper.

In short, stop whining and fetch your hat.

Hunger

There—a stray cat. And I, too, a stray in the alley of my mind. I lean into the silence. And the cat, too, leans. Both creatures pressed by the slow hush of night, by the iron clang of pipes, by the echo that lashes between brick and gutter. Lamp. Stone. Silence. For I am a stray cat, feeding off the scrapping peace that shivers between pavements, that coagulates at the bottom of cracked cups abandoned in cafés by the usual and unusual suspects. I alone, watching. The cat alone, prowling. Two outlines drawn by the same hand of hunger.

He pauses beneath lamps, sovereign in his shadow, indifferent to the gross criterion of sanity that seals my tongue when I would say to a stranger: you are beautiful. For God’s sake, I shall forsake despondency. Yet I am divorced from myself: one self bending toward abstinence, one self to desire—a broker of civil war between our inherent and standardized minds. Uncivil. Uncrowned.

And the cat slips through it all. Neither abstaining nor indulging. Only moving. Only shadow. Yet shadow like a kingly robe. Alive in his gorgeous strangeness, a lord of gutter and night. He passes and repasses, weaving like thread through the city’s dark loom, his motion a spell, his silence a command. His body is instinct—yet instinct magnified, transfigured. Mine, dismembered hesitation. His gait certain. Mine falters, mine shatters.

The difference: his paws strike stone and claim it as dominion, while my thoughts fracture like tossed glass against the alley wall. The similarity: both of us feed on scraps—his scraps of meat, mine scraps of peace—driven forward by that same hunger. Yet in him hunger is grandeur; in me, mere ache. The same loneliness curls, soft and sharp, like smoke that clings to damp corners, refusing to depart. Yet in his stride a majesty, in his stare a dark flame, unyielding. And I, half-ghost, wonder if some ember of that flame may yet burn in me.

The Virus

We spread faster now, fever-hot—over the skin of the world, carrying in our marrow the coiled codes of science, that ancient script that writes and rewrites itself in haste. We mutate in smoke and blood, expanding like a fire, seeking always the conditions to multiply. And so we produce more for ourselves and less for our unborn children. We are proteins and acids and hunger, answering to every flicker of change—the quake under the city, the market’s collapse, the sudden clang of war, death—as if we were not their foremost creator. The seas rise and we build higher walls; the walls fall, and we build weapons. Iron, gifted to us by the stars, we hurl into the air, into the flesh of strangers, tearing soil, poisoning rivers, choking sky. The universe regulates itself, but we rebel, striking at our own veins. Still the bombs bloom. Still new forms of death are fashioned in our laboratories, sharp and precise. We burn forests and we burn our minds. But the earth waits beneath us, patient, coiling, preparing to shake us loose.

While we destroy, we also dream. We lay in the soft grass to watch the slow drift of constellations while cities smolder behind us. We sing, even as the tide pulls at our knees. We paint walls we will raze, write words we will desert, plant seeds while we burn the other side of the forest. In the ruins, children still laugh—sharp, bright notes that rise above the hiss of ash.

The beauty lies not in our survival but in the symmetry of our undoing. For every tower raised, there is the wind to wear it down; for every empire carved in stone, there is the tide to sweep it clean. The monuments soften and ripple as if they were never stone at all, but wax. The same hands that build the bomb cradle the newborn. The same mouths that spit rage whisper poetry under the lovers’ moon.

And so the universe corrects itself—not in vengeance, but in balance. For we are a virus. We are a fever; the earth is a cool cloth. We flare and falter; the world endures, steady and serene. When our noise has faded, the oceans will lift their glassy faces to the sun again. New green will glide over the bones of our destruction. The wind will move through the empty streets, now glistening rivers. The world shall once again cradle plants and animals, whose symbiosis—unbound by us—was and will be more graceful than our own.

And in that unhuman silence, the earth will breathe freely, living fully in its new, green present beneath a sky that no longer carries the weight of our fire—like a lover moving on.

The Wish

I wish—to have a wish.

It is the hour of higher dusk—when shadows grow heavier, folding themselves into the hollow curves of the body and the earth—a quiet beckoning pulse beneath the ribs of the world. The day slopes down, slow and sure, as if tired fingers were pulling the light from the sky. Trees stand at the edges of vision, their outlines black as ink spilled across a pale page, blurred where the dusk swells and softens. It presses against the skin, a bruise that blooms without color, where once longing throbbed bright and fierce—now a dull ache, stretched wide like an ancient wound that refuses to close.

And still I feel it, that absence, vast as emptiness itself, a hollow vastness whispering in the silence. A wish—just one small, fragile wish—would suffice to silence the old incantations, those black-lettered murmurs I pressed deep into skin, into the tissue and blood of myself. The spells I cast—quiet, persistent—against the mirror that would not hold me, against the self that shimmered and slipped away like water spilled from cupped hands, never to be gathered whole again. The echoes of those spells falter now. Dimmer. Yet the sorrow remains, shimmering gray and cold—like fallen sequins scattered across a dance floor.

Now, in this liminal hour when the sun draws back his hand, retreating beneath the horizon’s edge, when the world leans into a silence, a crow rises—a black comma punctuating the amber sentence of the sky. And for a breath, just one breath, I find peace. Briefly. Utterly. One day, I will give my body not to another disappointment folded in the shape of man, not to the weary cycle of yearning and abandoning, but to the crow. I will feed it. Let it take what’s left, let it clean the ache from my bones, let it pick the last poetry from my ribs and carry it skyward, not in mourning, but as flight.

But my lips—let them be like young sparrows, soft and wild, mouths open to the breath of the world, trembling on the brink of flight. They do not yet know the trick of the wind but stretch—endlessly stretch—toward the sacred newness that waits beyond the dusk, waiting in the quiet, waiting in the pulse that beckons the heart to begin again.

Oh — that is a wish.

The Trade

You, whose heart is a fist clenched tight around fear—come closer. I see you. You whose mind hums like a wire stretched to breaking, every thought split by numbers, debts, credits, by the ticking metronome of bills and booze — of balancing. The world has made even rest a luxury. The cost of stillness—guilt. The cost of dreams—delay. And so, you trade pieces of your soul for survival.

I want you to know: you are not failing. The system is loud and sharp and built to fray the edges of tenderness. And yet—here you are. Still waking. Still offering kindness to strangers even as your own hands tremble. I have seen others too—some with suits stitched in quiet desperation, some with holes in their shoes and eyes full of sky—and I tell you: the pain is not proof that you are broken. It is proof that you want to be whole: the calling of the human endeavor. Discovery, service, connection, love. Is that not the calling of the human being: to love?

We love minds—light flickering across water—those we name friends, whose thoughts rise to meet ours in morning conversation, in shared silence, in the curve of a question. We love bodies—warmth beneath the surface—those we call lovers, whose skin we know as we know the sea, not by the map but by the tide, the salt, the way it holds us. And we love the whole—soul, breath, form and word—when the mind and the body sing not in harmony but in one voice, and we name them spouse.

But always—the world speaks: You must have all. A mind and a body, a mirror and a flame. One is not enough. They say it in dining rooms. They say it in coffee shops. They say it in glances that hover too long. They say it in quiet, in the shape of a couple walking; and loudly in stories told again and again, on screens, in books, in songs.

Yet what if the ember burns steady in only one place? What if the mind alone is enough to echo through the corridors? What if the body alone is symphony, not prelude? What if you are full already—not lacking, not paused—but entire?

The house does not need all its doors thrown wide. A single room lit. A single voice answered. A single presence held in the hand or the mind. That, too, is a world. That, too, is a life

You long for peace—not just the absence of fear, but the soft, full presence of enough. A quiet morning. A day without calculation. A moment of breath not taxed by the future.

Rest is not a reward for having done enough. It is your birthright.

Let us make, together, a rebellion: a stillness that does not apologize. Let the frantic wind of survival howl outside for a moment. Let your shoulders drop. Let your jaw loosen. There is time yet. There is always time to become whole.

Even to your penultimate breath.

The Return

When the mind becomes a locked house, once warm, now shuttered from within—the windows fogged by silence, the doors swollen from disuse—outside, the world seems to rage on all the brighter, louder, quicker than the pulse beneath my skin can follow.

When each morning breaks like glass—shards of light across a floor—I find time pooling in corners, thick and unmoving. I trace cracks in the world instead of paths forward. I learn the language of stillness, of small breaths. I become fluent in the art of appearing.

When they tell you to rise, to hustle, to transform pain into fuel, doubt into drive—what if the self they demand I become is a stranger? What if I have already burned too long in the furnace of expectation—each smile a forged mask, each word a rope pulling me away from the truth of what I feel?

When depression does not shout, but murmurs, hums in the bones—when it is not absence, but presence in another key, a lower chord, constant, like distant machines in a factory long abandoned—it does not want to kill, but to erase; to soften the edges until you become less than a shadow.

When isolation—its twin—does not always come from solitude, but arrives in crowds, in conversations where I nod on cue, laugh on time, vanish behind practiced gestures—when the world demands I be better, without asking if I can simply be whole.

When the days of growth feels like betrayal, healing feels like pretending, even the thought of progress—of stepping into a world quick to slice, to measure, to mock—feels like walking naked into a hailstorm.

There is more than this—no more to achieve, no more to prove, but more to be—a life that does not require constant defense, a self not carved into palatable pieces, a world without performance. I do not know if I believe in that world, but some part of me aches toward it—quietly, like roots pressing through stone.

When maybe that is enough, for now: to ache, to press, to not vanish—not yet.

When I remember—though the memory is not solid, not whole—a time when breath came easy, when the day unfolded like paper boats down brooks in golden summer. When I remember bare feet in grass, and the world humming softly—not the harsh clatter of obligation, but the slow song of discovery. When each pebble was a galaxy, each puddle a portal. Then, I was light. Then, I laughed without earning it.

When I ask, “Where did it turn?”

When I search the seam, the fault line between then and now, and cannot find it. There was no ceremony, no closed door—only small trades, each day: a piece of wonder for a bit of sense, a dream for a number, a question for an answer. When slowly, the trades stopped feeling optional. Now joy arrives dressed in receipts, must be justified, scheduled, performed. When childhood joy had no witness, no need to be shared to be real—it simply was. When adulthood is built on proof—on minutes and milestones and metrics. I mourn that child in silence.

When still I ask, “When did I agree to this? When did the game become a task? When I began to edit myself before I even spoke?” It happened in passing—like sand slipping through fingers. When I clutch handfuls of silence and try to shape it back into joy.

When they say it is the way of things, that growing is shedding, that we must put away childish things—but I did not put them away—I lost them in the dark, one toy train at a time. When I lost the joy of simply dreaming, the voice that sang without needing to be good, the hours that stretched, not shrank.

When I see children now—how their feet run before thought can stop them, how their faces betray every feeling, bright and raw—I envy them, and I mourn the child that could play with them still.

When it simply comes heavy.

Still, some part of me turns—like a plant to pale light. I reach through glass, through years, for the child who still lives in echoes, in shadows, in the corners of songs I once knew.

If I could just remember him fully—what he saw, what he knew before they told him otherwise—maybe I could unlearn this weight. Maybe I could walk, not march. Maybe I could be, not prove.

When maybe, just maybe, joy will come—not as a reward, but as a return.

Coronation

America was an open wound—throbbing beneath the starched collars and stitched flags, pulsing beneath the skin of parades and proclamations. It bled in silence while brass bands marched on, oblivious, as if melody could cauterize. White gauze wrapped the body—New York to California—and still the fever never broke. Beneath the cologne and the paneling, under the weight of speeches when men leaned too far into power.

He spoke not of systems but of fate. Of invisible lines binding the nation—not veins grown within, but grafts imposed, cold and rigid, drawing lifeblood toward profit. Not a machine of progress, but a furnace of hunger. He conjured pyramids, dragged ancient stones into newspapers so that greed might masquerade as courage. He called upon old walls and new wonders, but what I heard—what I felt—was not wonder, but want. The ancient thirst in a new bottle.

And yet his eyes, those calculating instruments, saw not a country but a mechanism. Each man a cog, each nod a piston, each handclap another gear. No heartbeats here. Only motion.

They stirred—the high men of the nation—with the eagerness of those long trained to equate vision with value. They imagined deeds, stocks, maps carved with their names. Futures passed down like silver. But in truth, their hearts had calcified. Only their hunger remained, sharpened by inheritance.

And I—I drifted at the edge of it, neither inside nor far enough away. I watched and I wondered.

Is this how it begins again? Not with a cry, but with a claim? Not with chains, but with contracts? I have seen empires wrap themselves in reason and rot from the inside out. I have seen systems that do not lead home, only deeper into forgetting.

He proclaimed that money would bind the nation—an unbreakable thread, a silver seam through fractured flesh. But beneath those words, the truth revealed itself like bruises blooming beneath fragile skin—black, swollen, unyielding. Iron, cold and merciless, driven through bone not grown with it, a violence disguised as, and in, progress. Children, wide-eyed and silent, taught to whisper its name as promise, even as it fed ravenously—on their silence, their sweat, their fruitful soil turned dust.

Yet beyond this fevered delirium, beyond the towering walls of gold and glass that gleamed with hollow pride, another world stirred—a world where the lifeblood was no grafted vein but a pulsing heart; where this nation did not bleed out, but bloomed as the first wildflowers do after the long winter; where hands raised not cold towers of conquest but warm bridges of kinship; where joy was not the scattered residue of surplus, but the very air that stirred the soul.

Could there be a society less shackled to hunger’s cruel yoke? Less cleaved by shadows cast by insatiable profit? Could peace root itself in fields long ravaged by greed’s relentless plow? Could equality, long whispered as a fragile dream, rise anew—bold and blazing like the dawn?

Perhaps the lesson of this empire is not its ruin alone, but its warning—a solemn reminder that civilization must be more than a general ledger weighed by assets and liabilities. That hope, fragile yet fierce, is a thread as strong as iron, if only it is chosen, woven, and held fast—built into railways that simply, and beautifully, stay.

And so, in the stillness that followed the speech, the wound pulsed—raw and unhealed—the fever burned on, relentless. But beneath the noise: the faint, steady heartbeat of what might be.

Strand

There are encounters that unseat a man from the furniture of his own mind, that strip away the greatcoat of habit and expose the pinked, quivering machinery beneath. Not love, nor death, nor even the bombs that now ornament the sky. No — something far older. Older than language, older than the Thames herself, who still gurgles with Roman bones and the dreams of drowned queens.

It was early — that peculiar London grey before the hour turns decent. The river slouched low, its surface thick with yesterday’s soot and the floating tatters of today’s myth. And there, beneath Blackfriars Bridge, she rose — if one dares impose the grammar of gender on something so utterly beyond taxonomy.

She was magnificent. And dreadful. Like something dredged from a forgotten corner of Ovid, where the margins were too damp for proper translation. A creature made not for terror, exactly, but for awe. Her form shimmered not with light, but with memory — long ribbons of scaled shadow trailing into the Thames, eyes like smoked opal, and an expression that bore the unmistakable melancholy of having seen too much.

He could not name her — not with any word that wouldn’t crumble under its own inadequacy. Not woman, no. Not wholly beast. A cipher perhaps — as though some ancient intelligence had grown bored of form and simply arranged itself into myth. She stood there like a page torn from a forbidden codex — the sort of text whispered about in wet corners of old libraries, the kind said to have been written in fever and hidden by occult secretaries under floorboards thick with rot.

There was no indication of malice, and yet the very geometry of her presence unsettled the eye. One could not quite tell where her limbs began, or whether she had limbs at all. Her face flickered in and out of coherence, like a name nearly recalled.

Her eyes did not merely observe him. They dismantled him, kindly, as one might take apart a clock to better understand its error. He stood, bare to that gaze, and she seemed to read him in reverse, as though his entire life were being played backward for her amusement: childhood, war, this summer. She opened her mouth, wide and slow. No sound emerged, but a strange stillness fell over the scene — even the river seemed to lean closer. A quiet suggestion passed between them. It was not language. It was not thought. It was the echo of something prior to thought. And then, as though drawn backward by invisible threads, she receded beneath the water, leaving nothing but a ripple and a sudden absence of birdsong.

Now, he walks from the river, leaving behind the shadowed water and the lingering echo of that impossible presence, the city’s grey folding around him, that familiar cloak. The door to the bookstore swings open softly, a cool breath of paper and ink rising to meet him, stories waiting, eager, patient. Here — here is the threshold, the soft divide between this world and the countless others folded within these shelves. What worlds will open? What voices will rise and fall, carrying him beyond the walls of this room, beyond the dull ache of days? Oh, to be unbound, unmoored, to drift in currents spun from ink and imagination — the thrill of beginning, again and again, as if the very air were singing, and he, a child with a secret. The pages whisper promises, the stories pulse quietly, and joy — yes, pure joy — floods the hollow spaces inside him, swelling until he forgets the world and becomes nothing but light, a spark caught in the endless turning of time. This is where it begins again — he thinks — where I become everything and nothing all at once.

Rittenhouse Square

“My dear, have you ever truly looked at the way the light settles in Rittenhouse Square at this hour? Not merely shining—heavens, no, that would be far too straightforward—but resting, as though it too has grown weary of America’s prolonged nervous breakdown and decided to lie down quietly on the gravel path, like a governess who’s simply had enough.

Now, do look—just there. That bee, pitiful little thing, entombed in the bloom of a Tibouchina. Exotic, unnecessarily so. Quite ridiculous, really, given Philadelphia’s climate. One imagines it shipped in from California—or perhaps some forgotten botanical tantrum—to add a splash of drama to this otherwise beige collection of states they once dared to call "The New World." New, perhaps—but not necessarily improved. My dear, even Eden was new once. We know how that turned out. And America is rather like Eden, if the serpent had a hand in the planning committee.

And that woman—yes, the one in rose-coloured silk—drifting past like one of Botticelli's tarts. She doesn’t walk; she glides, as though auditioning for an allegory. Honestly, after all we’ve endured—the headlines, the hearings, the moral hemorrhaging—can a well-cut hemline still stir a soul? I rather doubt it. Though I'm sure someone at the New Yorker will try to argue otherwise in 6,000 words.

Listen to the brickwork beneath our shoes. Go on, listen. You can almost hear the ghosts muttering. Who laid them? Who’s laid on them? Ghosts, my dear. Ghosts and patriots with poor impulse control. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin himself, storming off in a huff, tripping over his principles. Or some lesser founding son skulking home after a scandal, pockets full of half-finished manifestos.

And look there—that girl with the seashell pressed to her ear like it’s whispering stock advice from Poseidon himself. Look there, a woman sways, not to any music we can hear, but to something primal, something private, as if joy were cellular and not quite sanctioned. She sways—not with decorum but with desire, as if her body recalled something her mind had yet to understand. The others look on, appalled. As if delight were indecent. As if she’d walked into one of those American yoga classes wearing makeup and good news. "Yoga,’ they call it — sounds less like a bit of exercise and more like something you catch from a mosquito in the colonies. Honestly, this country, my dear. Joy in this country is treated with the same enthusiasm as a bad case of the measles—best avoided, spoken of in whispers, and generally blamed on everyone else.

Is it the news cycle? The endless grief scroll? Or simply the long shadow of history sprawling across these streets like a houseguest who refuses to leave?

And the black clothing—why? The sun is out, but they are all dressed as though headed to the sort of funeral where no one cries, and everyone silently hopes the will was thorough. Even here, in Rittenhouse, in the sun, these people are suspicious of anything soft, or sincere.They are a nation that mistrusts its own laughter.

Look— bankers with the expressions of well-fed but emotionally stunted bulldogs, clerks who stare as though time itself has become impolite, and students clutching books they’ve never opened, but display like relics. And I—I sit beneath this tree. I’ve taken to calling Hamilton. He looks the part: noble, unbothered, clearly disappointed in everyone. He has witnessed riots, parades, renovations, and revolutions—and yet he endures. Judging, of course, but enduring.

I’ve read everything worth reading, I believe—Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, the Greeks . Their voices built the scaffolding of my better thoughts. But now—now I suspect I’ve had quite enough of other people’s conclusions. Perhaps it’s time I write some of my own. Not for fame, nor posterity, but simply to capture this peculiar moment, this city, and this version of myself.

So tell me, shall we write it all down? Before it changes again, and pretends it never happened?”