Work Text:
After nine days and nights of travel, I encountered the city of Arimneste. I sensed the city long before I saw it: the ringing of city bells signalling a new work day, the scent of the ocean breeze, the murmurs of people in the streets that thrummed in my heart. Black marble domes and gold spire towers rose into the hazy horizon; I knew these to be the churches and banks and grand hotels that I had once walked along when it was the season of festivals and all were in an indulgent mood.
I crested a hill and the Arimneste revealed herself: the floating districts of red-roofed apartment buildings and glass shopping arcades that had been my childhood haunts threaded through with macadam roads and aquamarine canals stretching towards the harbour where steamships and fishing vessels docked and departed along the same tides that had started my travels. I searched the city for familiar contours and found them in the water taxis gliding to and fro along canals (cheap to ride, their stops are within a five minute walk to one’s destination, quite useful to my student self), the old men reminiscing at the city square with the tiled fountain (as in Isidora, they talk of isolated moments plucked from the past), the shoppers gathered at stores and open markets selling catches fresh from the lagoons, handcrafted glassworks, imported wares (when I was a child, my mother had taught me how to find the best wares, the hidden deals here).
As I approached the city gates, the lilting murmurs sharpened into fragmented conversations filled in by faded recollections. Idle chatter drifted out of smoky cafes and office hallways in a breakneck stream of local gossip and long-awaited observances and anxieties pertaining to the city, half-hidden behind evershifting actors and colloquialisms. In the markets and docks, vendors and shoppers haggled in a mixture of archaic measurements and idioms for local specialities. Throughout the streets, the alleyways, the gilded bridges, Arimneste’s inhabitants met and parted in accordance with local customs and manners, their logics and connotations instinctively discernable to me. All these melded together in the wind to form a language unto itself, my second mother tongue. I had long grown accustomed to the unsettledness that follows every visitor and forgotten the experience of familiarity, until now.
I entered the city and Arimneste greeted me as a stranger.
The city of black marble domes, aquamarine canals, floating districts of apartments and arcades had vanished, replaced by identical suburbs with rows of brick houses and shopping malls firmly anchored into the earth. In the place of canals there laid unending webs of asphalt roads that flowed with cars and buses; the streets, absent of food stalls and vendors, would rumble intermittently as the subways teemed with activity. If there was still a harbour, it was obscured by the factories, the displays of discontinued water taxis that dotted city streets, the skyscrapers of glass and steel.
I walked through the streets, the threads of conversation I had once been able to follow became like radio static, the actors and topics that I had once known replaced by strangers. I tried my hand in the markets and surviving arcades, and found my speech and knowledge far too old fashioned to be of any use; embarrassed, I fell back onto the common tongues I had learned on my travels, onto gestures, symbols, pantomimes. Too late, I realised Arimneste had set me adrift in yesterday.
In the end, I settled among the old men in the city square, the people of yesterday who sat by and watched Arimneste pass them by. One would say, “Here there once stood the central train station, the city’s lynchpin,” and another would recall, “Once, costumed hawkers and vendors walked the streets, selling the city’s summer harvests in song,” and the rest of us would add on, eager to contribute to an ever shifting snapshot of the city in another time. The Arimneste of my memories had vanished long ago—or perhaps, it never existed at all.