The sun rises
in great silence

but the waters,
pregnant with legend,

speak in silvery whispers.

Behold,
o nameless pilgrim,

behold
the holy flame,

what men have called
Byzantium,
Constantinople,
Istanbul,

behold
this dream of civilization
carved by the wisdom of death,

behold
this city of domes,
cats and conquerors,

behold
this city of prophecy
that cuts through continents
like a sword.

Make what you want of it,
o nameless pilgrim,
it shall not be enough.


[7:12 am, 24th October 2025,
Karaköy, Istanbul.]

Today
I found a picture 
from my past

which recalled 
a day that once was.

A night spent asleep on a pier.
A sunrise train with red upholstery.
The scent of Neapolitan pizza.
The sound of song in a cliffside cave.
A walk inside Sappho’s verses.

The remains of an ordinary day
laid out invitingly
in the vivid garden of memory.

But then, 
out of nowhere,
I remembered something else,

a fragile realisation
that invaded the moment 

the way a lightning bolt
shatters
the stillness of a starry night.

That day,
you were still alive.

[Self-translated from the Spanish original]

My ear to your skin,

listening to the bare landscape
of a poem unwritten.

Word after word 
tumbling
 
into 
the sentence of our lives,

each syllable
a passing music.

This is what 
the afternoon sounds like,
dear,

two winged stories
echoing

over a sea of miracles.


[4:43pm, 2nd Sept 2023,
Coyoacán, Cuidad de México.]



***



Mi oído en tu piel,

escuchando el paisaje desnudo
de un poema no escrito.

Palabra tras palabra
cayendo
 
en
la oración de nuestras vidas,

cada sílaba
una música que pasa.

Así es como
suena la tarde,
querida,

dos historias aladas
resonando

sobre un mar de milagros.


[4:43pm, 2nd Sept 2023,
Coyoacán, Cuidad de México.]

I have been thinking
about the way 
your hands used to grip mine.

That thing
(whatever science and religion call it)
that charges through this universe,

coursing through our palms,

bridging
the temples of our existence.

We have little left
of each other now,

but these bridges,
they will dream us on. 


[9:12am, 24th March 2024,
Kurnool, India.]

A high table by the stairs, 
a diffracted sunset in the distance.

Más olivas, por favor, 
I hear myself say to the waiter
absentmindedly.

That nape,
casually warping light
into silent song.

An image
sent hurtling down the spine,
echoing in plain sight.

Fingers meet pen,
pen meets serviette,
a new geometry in ink.

Quiero pintarte, 
querida,
en un lienzo de palabras.

A smile in exchange for a sentence,
that is how you build a universe.


[9:12 pm, 18th August 2023,
Centro, Oaxaca de Juárez.]

Forgive me, querido México,
I am late

but you, 
who existed long before they invented history,
know what it means to wait.

Who and what you are,
my meagre humanity will never fully comprehend 
but

in your present I will taste your past

and somewhere within the margins of your existence
I will find the unyielding echo 
of your ancient music.


***


Break my heart, querido México,
break my eager, implacable heart,

remould it in the shapes of your labyrinthine dreams,
shower it with the longing of your magnetic stars,
reveal to it the footsteps of your forgotten gods,
soak it in the endless solitude of your deserts,
shelter it within the adobe walls of your language,

break my heart, querido México,
break my fiery, hungry heart

and carve into it
the map of a new, wide-eyed life.


[2:37 pm, 23rd July 2023,
Condesa, Ciudad de México.]

It had to be here. Nowhere but here.
The bridge where all distances begin and end, where all roads converge and diverge. This is where the farewells began, and this is where they end.

What do I say when there is, simultaneously, too little and too much to say?

Five months of purposeless magnificence in this ancient culture, driven by nothing but curiosity. I was a vagrant, moving on local trains, buses, resting wherever I found a pillow and a shower, often not knowing where that would be until the sky darkened. I had no interest in the present, the living, because it was a distraction. 

I was obsessed with the past and I just wanted to get to it. I walked all day and all night in cities, towns, highways, hilly forests, neon-filled alleys, foggy beaches, moon-lit cemeteries… Whatever was ahead of me, I walked through it. That is all I wanted to do, really, to walk, to walk until I moved not just through space, but through time. I wanted to walk until the world fell apart under my feet and opened up a path into the heart of this ancient land.

I don’t know where or when that happened, but it did happen, somewhere along the 2064 kilometres my feet dragged me through. I gazed, gazed and gazed until one moment, Japan gazed back. No words can describe the brilliance and darkness of that gaze and it swallowed me whole.

This place, it is home to some of humanity’s greatest accomplishments and some of its darkest. I let everything pass through me, eyes open every waking moment, looking up, looking down, looking ahead and looking behind with every step I took. Attention is the purest form of love, and I loved Japan with everything I had. It leaves me battered, bruised and bent out of shape, and I will make poetry of it for the rest of my time. 

Farewell, Nihon.
I am ready to walk into the light now.

To be seated on the stone benches of the Aoyama Cemetery on my last night in the city, with streetlamps and stones for company, it feels fitting, because it is an echo of so many evenings spent here. This is a space unlike any other, in this city or in this country. Tokyo has some fine cemeteries, the one in Yanaka is wonderful, smaller and quainter, the Zoshigaya has its own charm, but the Aoyama is unique.

The most prominent part of Japan’s identity is the seamless marriage of the old and the new, each brushing shoulders with the other while giving each other space and deference. Neon-bright arcades share walls with ancient shrines while Kimono-clad ladies ride escalators into minimalist cathedrals of capitalism. Time moves in both directions here, and it is a sight to behold.

The Aoyama Cemetery is a perfect encapsulation of that. It stands in the centre of the city, an endless expanse of prime real estate filled with gravestones, surrounded by modern skyscrapers who watch over it like sentinels. And at no other time is it more beautiful than at night, with views of calligraphed gravestones framed against the stars and the dim, distant lights of floating offices.

And that is good enough to keep me here tonight.

***

I have no interest in the macabre and to me, cemeteries are anything but that. They are spaces of peace, of memory, of grief, of dense time, of love. I wonder, are there any other places that remind us more intensely of the human capacity to love? 

The love we have for the departed, it is perhaps as pure as it gets because it is done without expectation, without requital. Cemeteries are windows into how we love, filled with symbols of the living’s affection for the departed. Every sculpted stone, every engraved word, every fragrant flower is an act of love and being there, surrounded by all that unadulterated emotion, exalts me.

Every culture has its own traditions, its own ways of expressing these affections, and this curiosity makes me seek out cemeteries everywhere I go. Each is unique in its own way, yet so fundamentally human. There’s the Pere Lachaise in Paris (where I spent my last birthday), the Cimitero Accatolico in Rome (where Keats, my high priest of beauty, is buried), the Highgate in London, the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague (the New one too, Kafka’s resting place)… These are some of my favourite places in the world, and the Aoyama Cemetery is part of that list now.

This is an allegory,
truth buried in the language of drama.

A story of the world
and us.

Fuji San, immovable,
in the windy distance

while we struggle,
holding on to what we have
mistaking it for who we are.

Let go,
Hokusai is telling us,
let go.

Sometimes
the world is not as heavy
as it feels.


[11:36 am, 24th May 2023,
Shinsaibashi, Osaka.]

*Written upon viewing an original print of Katsushika Hokusai's "Ejiri in Suruga Province", from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

The opportunity to touch history is not something that falls to us often. History is so removed for most that the thought of touching it is never really on our agenda.

The act of touch, to have something in our hands that has gathered time, like dust, it is one of life’s purest pleasures. It is so often the most overlooked dimension of travel, I sometimes think, the tactility of a foreign culture. How do we know someone without ever being able to hold them, to feel the textures of their being?

***

After marveling at Ainu and other non-cotton textiles for months in one museum after another, framed away behind glass, untouchable, I wished I could find a way to bridge that distance. To hold and feel the weight of the fabric, the texture, the scent and the ingenuity, to discover the warp and weft of history.

A robe woven from the bark of the Elm tree, thin like a breeze.

Natural beige from the Wisteria vine, soft and welcoming.

Swatches of fabric born of the linden tree, light but firm, self-aware.

Ceremonial pieces made from the Kuzu vine, glimmering with resilience.

Paper mulberry fabrics that told everyday stories.

Each of them many decades old, some centuries old. To touch each of them, really, is to feel the immovability of an idea as the world transformed around it.

***

The materiality of this afternoon, it was truly something, an education. I scribble these words hastily, standing at a bus stop surrounded by school bags and navy blue blazers, but I’ll return to this often and more intensely. Every farewell is a beginning, but this one feels like an especially powerful start of something.

***

I was aware of how challenging this particular farewell would be to experience, given the rarity of the objects themselves. But Japan has been extraordinarily kind to me, so kind that I will never understand what I’ve done to deserve it.

Thank god for interesting friends. Thank you, Kei San, for the education.

He was in a Zen garden
one morning

gazing into a rock

when he felt
the weight of her words
rush into his heart

like a landslide.

A thousand years apart,
their glances met.


[11:07 am, 25th May 2023,
Tōfuku-ji, Kyoto.]


*Izumi Shikibu (976 ~ 1030 AD) was a Heian-era poet at the Imperial Court in Kyoto.

Tonight,
you are nothing
but light

and I,
your shadow.


[3:29 am, 25th May 2023,
Fushimi, Kyoto.]

Light runs
along the glass

trapped 
in golden yellow spirals
as I swirl you around.

A little dance, of course,
before I descend
into the soft cage of your delight.

An epic ballad
born of the mountains, 
you reveal different metaphors
with each reading.

Under the gaze of the crescent moon
this goodbye-shaped night

what shall you be?


[8:12 pm, 24th May 2023,
Pontocho, Kyoto.]

Watching an Ozu film is like living a life.

You are invited into living rooms, to picnics, to family dinners, to everyday conversations which are so banal they can only be real. Lives unfold around you while laundry flutters in the backyard with the kind of poetry only dailiness can evoke. The bird in the cage occasionally reminds you of its existence, the tea pot gently hisses, furniture crouches. This is what life is like, Ozu seems to say. 

Nothing really happens, because it doesn't need to. You are just grateful to be there, to be allowed to witness these intimate moments in the most private of spaces, someone else's home. The perspective never wavers, almost always as if you're seated on the tatami, right by their side. And then there are his sublime compositions, every shot as intricate as a still-life. Everything is spaced deliberately, everything in its place, like a Japanese garden.

How do you describe an Ozu film?
Somewhere between Japan's past and its future, his characters struggle. And you're invited to witness it. In the case of this particular film, a modern woman of "marriageable age" who refuses to bend to the burdens of tradition, old parents who have not known a world other than the one they grew up in and fought for, everything is laid bare. You stay inside a home long enough, you discover everything about its inhabitants. That's all there is to an Ozu film, almost every one is the same as the one that came before it and the one that came after.


***


While Kurosawa concerned himself with the public, the outward expression of his culture, Ozu concerned himself with the private, the inward expression of being Japanese. The archetypal Kurosawa character is therefore concerned with external strife, played out in battlefields and open arenas, while Ozu's is concerned with internal strife, played out in living rooms, around dining tables.


***


Ozu once described himself as "the painter who keeps painting the same rose over and over again." Every time I watch his work, I can't shake away his choice of flower in that quote, at how apt it is.

A rose is an infinity, a shape that warps into itself, an eternity spiralling into itself for all eternity. To paint one over and over again is to be able to find eternity in the little things, to find the poetry in stillness. That he did.

[Images are screenshots from the movie, of course. All rights rest with the copyright holders.]

All buildings talk, but only a few make any sense. 
And even fewer are capable of poetry. 

One of the purposes of architecture is communication, whether it's an idea or an entire philosophy. But it is only one of many purposes and usually not the most important one, so it's understandable that most buildings are never designed to truly communicate. 

But religious structures are a little different. They exist mainly so they can communicate. All else is secondary. And that is why you can actually have conversations with them. Long, profound conversations.

That is if you know how to, of course. 
Architecture is experienced, not seen. It is similar to painting or literature in that sense, but dramatically different in that architecture has access to multiple dimensions to communicate with you (you can't actually walk through a painting, but you can through a building, which opens up many avenues, no pun intended). 

It takes a certain openness, a vulnerability, that allows us to communicate with the world, because with communication comes feeling. It is no different with architecture (or any art, for that matter). One needs to be able to stand with their heart completely open, open to anything that can come in. Unfortunately, it is a skill adulthood kills in most of us, so it is something to be re-acquired.

Anyway, back to architecture. 
It is possible that every time one visits a masterwork of architecture anywhere in the world, one can drink from the deep waters of history. Drink straight, unfiltered, from the traditions, philosophy and context that gave birth to that singular structure which wouldn't exist anywhere else in the world. No purer source to experience time, really.


***


Waters, yes, waters.
Is there any modern master who understands water's relationship to architecture more intensely than Tadao Ando? No wonder I have a particularly intimate relationship with his work, because somehow water, sky and austerity seem to occupy critical positions in both our worldviews.

And so it brings us to the Mizumidō, the Water Temple at the Honpukuji. It is a temple in the Shingon Buddhist tradition, a twelve hundred year old tradition with its own multi-layered architecture, rituals and belief system that existed and thrived long before Ando, a modern architect, was tasked with interpreting that in the 1980s. And this is what he came up with.

Tucked away in a tiny village in Awaji, far away from the Shinkansen trail and consequently the tourist trail, it has a bucolic existence of its own. No one really goes there. Silence abounds, perfect for a proper conversation.

And I had one this morning.
Of course I'm not translating any of that for you, reader, because it is untranslatable. I can share some pictures, which are also pitiful attempts at capturing its light, but they're all I have. (You can easily find better pictures on the web, done with the right equipment and permissions.)

Reinterpretations of ancient traditions in modern materials is a magnificent avenue to feel so many things (modernist cathedrals, for example). I'm obsessed with such structures, enough to travel across the world just for moments with them. In the right hands, the chance to reinterpret tradition for the future can be a powerful force, a way of bending time.

How do I describe this structure?
An unassuming approach, a return to essentials in terms of materials, an inversion of tradition by descending into a temple as opposed to ascending. Lotus. Shakkei, borrowed from the ancients but done anew. And water, glorious water, as a tool to expand the world.

Trying to describe architecture in words is akin to describing music in words, which is to say futile. All I can say is that it was sublime. I don't use that word lightly, but it is what it is. 

I only live and travel so I can feel emotions preserved in time and this genius, somehow, gave me access to an entire millennium worth of them. Ironically, even the word religious feels inadequate to describe it.

This is my final week in Japan.

A week-long farewell to what has been a five month-long affair, this is going to be manic. I'm actually trembling a little as I write this, because I know the intensity of what I'm going to feel over the coming days. Of course, I know this all sounds a little dramatic, as if I'll never see Japan again, which is absolutely rubbish. (I'm self-aware enough to know how much of a drama queen I can be, but I don't care.) Because I know I'll never see Japan again through this version of myself... What ends here this week, actually ends here. Next time will be different, it always is.

You see, I treat my endings very seriously. Like little deaths. Like walking into a funeral pyre. The end of existence, with nothing to follow. That's the only way I can reconcile with ending something while still feeling things as intensely as I do. Because, you know, someday one of these endings will actually be the actual one. 

So, yes, little deaths. Every farewell is a little death. Once you make your peace with that and feel it for what it is, the moment after the farewell opens up. Like a blank page. Things don't carry over, because you've already given everything you have to give. You're burnt to a crisp, you're just ashes. What follows a death? Birth, obviously. Glorious, fresh, untainted birth. 

But then, let me not get too ahead of myself. I'm still a week away from my next birth. I still have the intensity of this week-long death to feel.

And damn god, it's going to be painful and beautiful, which are often the same thing. 


***


I've got only six more nights left in this glorious country, but I have no idea where I will be tomorrow. Of course, there are the usual mechanisms to figure it out, tricks I use all the time when I travel. 

Flip coins to choose the direction to move in / choose from an existing wishlist built since childhood / engage with unwitting strangers to make the decision as an unbiased party / revisit old favourites and intensify existing relationships / or simply wait to get kicked out on the street and then move in the direction that's least uncomfortable... Shortcuts, really, to submit to fate/destiny/universe, whatever you want to call the thing outside of yourself. 

We'll see once I wake up tomorrow. That is if I sleep tonight, because Tokyo beckons, in all its neon-filled glory. I start in Nihonbashi tonight, a place that literally means "The bridge of Japan". The place where all distances in Japan originate, the point where they are all measured from... But sorry, this is not a history lesson, you can learn more on your own. 

I am surrounded by the ghosts of Hokusai's woodblock figures, and how comforting that is to have familiarity surround you. Alongside the skyscrapers. And the cemeteries. And the canals, and the gardens. And the parasols. And the layers and layers of history.

Tonight, the dying begins.

When the beat drops

beauty enters you
like a vine

through the limbs

an electric chariot
hastening down
the pathways of your being.

The silent fiction of life
falls away

you are no more

than a flame
in a sea of shadows

burning

like truth
like love

fierce enough 
to shatter the future.


[5:57 am, 6th May 2023,
Shibuya, Tokyo.]

I didn't arrive by ferry, as I’d always hoped to, but instead via the world's longest undersea tunnel. And, I won't be able to make it all the way to Sakhalin this time, thanks to the arbitrariness that is nationhood and the invisible lines we call borders. So this is far from perfect but by god, it feels good to write this.

Hokkaido, here I am.

Having been in Hakodate for just a day, I have nowhere else to start but its magnificent sky, a giant blue colosseum filled with raging bulls, prancing hares, basking whales and all manner of living things carved in spongy white. The brilliance of that blue, the softness of that white, my morning was lost somewhere between the two. For hours I sauntered around, unable to look down or look ahead. Eventually, I ended up lying down in a bed of yellow daisies on an empty football field in the bay, and soaked it all in, the world's ceiling. 

After an indeterminate amount of time, a bevy of dark grey clouds came out of nowhere, showering raindrops. It all passed in ten minutes, but the spell had been broken. I finally started to notice other things around me, starting with all the quaint old houses filling up the streets, punctuated by the yellow fire hydrants calling attention to themselves. And, of course, there were the cathedrals, traces of the early evangelists. The Russian Orthodox, the Anglican, the Catholic, all within a stone’s throw of each other, surrounded by the Buddhist and the Shinto shrines. And then there are the consul buildings - American, British and Russian - along with a swathe of old western-influenced architecture, a not so common sight in Japan. And, of course, there was Commodore Perry’s statue gazing down onto the bay, looking mighty pleased with himself.

The chequered 150-year history of Hakodate written in architecture. As interesting as it was, I came to Hokkaido for something else, for what was here all along, before the world had come calling. The Ainu. So I went seeking my primary reason, the Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples. I finally encountered my first reality of the Ainu, things I'd only read about, seen pictures of and even seen animated. And sigh, there were the textiles, woven of bast fiber, featuring geometric patterns so sublime I could stare at for hours. 

The story of the Ainu is the story of most indigenous peoples in the world, an ancient wisdom devastated by prejudice and “development”, so this is going to be an intense journey. I came to Hokkaido, or Ezo, as I should say, in the hope of experiencing the landscape that gave rise to their traditions and folklore, to assimilate a little bit of their worldview into my own. Reading is only ever a part of knowing, it's never really complete without knowing the sensation of standing somewhere and opening yourself up to let everything in. Without feeling the breeze of the firs, the birches and the oaks, without knowing the sight of the sun rising over the Okhotsk, without feeling the shrill midnight chill of the forest, how could I claim to know anything about the Ainu, no matter how many words I read about them?

So, well, hopefully this journey will give me a little bit of that while I also discover some tiny far-flung museums along the way. Ideally this journey would have continued north into Sakhalin to encounter the similar yet different landscapes that influenced the Karafuto Ainu, the Nivkh and the Orok, but that shall be for another day. Russia, when the time comes, shall possibly devour years of my life anyway, so the Trans-Siberian railway can wait. And that day, I shall assemble that experience with this one in my head, and they will fit perfectly, like two interlocking pieces of a puzzle.

For now, I shall make my way through Hokkaido, peeling through layers of its intricate history in long train rides along the coast, struggling to make sense of museum descriptions, walking over rolling meadows in bloom and enduring chilly nights under a star-filled sky.


[10:04 pm, 9th May 2023,
Hakodate, Hokkaido.]

The moon has just come out,
eleven miles into my day.

The future is here
even though the past isn’t done yet.

I begin to lose myself
in your trivialities,
the mythology of your ashen streets.

I know,
I know what’s coming.

From moonrise to dawn
I will stand upright against the night

defenseless

for you,
my dear Kyoto,

as you take a hammer to my heart.


[3:26 am, 1st May 2023,
Daitoku-ji, Kyoto.]

All.
All stories.
All stories exist.
All stories exist inside.
All stories exist inside, outside.
All stories exist inside, outside time.


[4:29 am, 16th December,
Naoshima.]

Introducing Otherwhere, a storytelling agency.
My next professional adventure.