Some cities remain inside the body
long after their streets have forgotten your name.
You learn this slowly.
First with neighbourhoods,
then with people.
You imagine that one more visit
will restore proportion.
That the road will remember your footsteps,
that the old café will recognise your silence,
that someone will still be waiting
exactly where memory left them.
But cities are indifferent.
Their greatest kindness
is that they continue
without consulting us.
The baker opens his shutters.
The bookseller dusts the same shelves.
Rain gathers in familiar potholes.
Even sorrow has neighbours now.
You stand where you once belonged
and realise belonging
was never a place.
It was a season.
The same is true of certain loves.
They continue to exist
the way old districts exist —
visited more often in thought
than by train.
You carry a map
whose streets no longer meet the streets.
Still,
your hands refuse to throw it away.
This is how longing survives:
not by asking to be fulfilled,
but by insisting
that return remains possible.
Although every migrant knows
the first country disappears
the moment it becomes memory.
And every river knows
the water that comes back
is never the water that left.
Still,
some mornings
I wake with an address
on the tip of my tongue.
Not his.
Not the city’s.
Something larger,
where both once lived.
By afternoon
I remember
that return is not a destination.
It is a story
we keep telling ourselves
so the distance
does not seem
like the only truth.
And yet,
when evening falls,
I still look
towards the west,
as though somewhere
a familiar street
might finally decide
to recognise me.
DoubleSpeak 