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?”