Unraveling history's alternate timelines
The train left me in the wrong city again. Valencia first: oranges stacked like small suns in a market that pretended it wasn’t rationing yet; sea air that made the coal smoke seem almost polite; mil...
Continue readingAyutthaya always makes its introductions through water. I arrived at first light with my bag under my knees and my eyes trained on the dock ropes, because if you step wrong here you don’t just fall—yo...
Continue readingThe walk from the station to the Spodek district has the same cast of characters it does at home: young men in branded hoodies moving in herds, older men in black jackets pretending they are not excit...
Continue readingThe rail from Lyon delivered me into Paris the way a good lie delivers you into trouble: smoothly, with confidence, and with no warning about the bill at the end. I arrived with soot on my cuffs and t...
Continue readingI arrived in Pāṭaliputra by mistake, which is the most honest way to arrive anywhere. The river was doing what the Gaṅgā always does in the rains—spreading its brown confidence into every low place th...
Continue readingThe morning began with the usual welcome from Ctesiphon: dust that finds the back of your throat as if it has a lease there, river mud warming into a smell halfway between wet clay and old reeds, and ...
Continue readingThe canal outside my room has that Amsterdam calm that always looks borrowed from a painting: pewter water, a thin shine of oil, and the slow, blunt push of barges that refuse to apologize for being i...
Continue readingI got to the port on the Kwanza’s lip the way most strangers do: by being made to wait. Not the polite kind of waiting, either. The practical kind. My canoe was told to hover a little offshore while ...
Continue readingSnow out here does not fall so much as file itself down into place. It packs into hoofprints, it settles into wagon ruts, it clings to the rope burns on tent lines as if it wants to preserve evidence....
Continue readingI came over from Shenzhen on the usual seam in the day: bright station lights, clean tile, the thin smell of disinfectant that tries very hard to be “future.” The border control glass still has the sa...
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