Baudelaire’s flâneur walked the streets of nineteenth-century Paris chronicling the theatre of urban life. Woolf’s flâneuse was an oyster of perceptiveness. The act of wandering in her words was street haunting.

Communion assumes a different shape from community when you are unmoored from the land that birthed and assembled you, when you don’t believe in the nation as a constellation of imagined communities, when the restless wanderer in you knows that home is always elsewhere.

To look at the sea is to become what one is.

But walking in a European city in a brown body feels audacious and the pleasure often conditional.

Skin too is a passport.

You walk into the folds of the city with a desire to roam, building a repository of memories that become cartographers over time.

Walking is your love language. Its lexicon anchored in presence and joy.

But all languages are colonial

The city in the waning of winter, the city on weeks where the sun doesn’t skip a day, the city on afternoons bathed in islands of buttermilk light, the city on the night the sky was a riotous pink, the city of Matisse and Chagall who captured its luminosity, the city of lengthening shadows that form filigrees, the city by the sea held in eternal bl... See more