These streets are familiar, the cobblestone patterns and manicured roundabouts, and the people zipping past on bikes, chatting and quarreling like birds. I walk through the city, self-conscious but happy, vaguely aware of the direction I’m headed. Down through the park with the musical sculpture. Over a footbridge that crosses the tracks. Somewhere in a drawer at home I have photos of me as a boy running around that sculpture and standing on tip-toe to look down at the tracks. I enter a district of small boutique shops with neat window displays tucked under their awnings. These were here last time. These I remember. Landmarks of a place that was never quite home.

Landmarks was first published on Dividual Notebook : An Exchange June 2016.