Journal

I landed this morning and the city was already moving at a speed I had forgotten. Not loud, exactly. More like it has a frequency that gets into you before you have had a chance to decide if you want it to.

I like that about New York. It does not ask. It assumes you are here because you meant to be. And I was. I am.

Edinburgh in April is not quite winter and not quite spring. The stone is still cold. The wind still finds you. But the light is longer than you expect and it does something beautiful to everything it touches.

And yet I did not want to leave. There is something honest about a place that shows you itself without decoration. I trust those places. I trust those people too.

I walked past this cathedral at night and stopped without meaning to. Something made me look up. The stone was lit from below — golden, ancient, impossibly detailed in the dark.

I have a feeling about certain places. A recognition that has nothing to do with having visited before. Edinburgh gave me that from the first hour. Like the city already knew me. Like I already knew it.

I think I have lived here before. In some other century. In some other body. Walking these same streets, under this same stone sky.

We drove for two hours into nothing. Black road, black sky, the kind of silence that makes you aware of your own breathing. And then they appeared. Not dramatic at first. A faint green suggestion at the edge of the horizon.

Then everything. The whole sky, moving. I have seen beautiful things. I have been in rooms where the energy between people was something almost visible. This was like that, but the sky was doing it.

Some things you cannot create. You can only be in the right place to receive them.

Prague is a city that does something unusual. It does not perform its history for tourists. The cobblestones are actually old. The buildings are actually that colour. The light in the afternoon actually does that.

I walked for hours without a plan. Something I almost never do. I think the city required it.

There is a particular kind of freedom that Berlin gives you that I have not found anywhere else. It is not permission, exactly. More like the absence of judgment. You can be whatever you are here and the city simply continues around you.

I danced. For hours. No reason other than that the music was good and I was alive and it was midnight and why would you not.