Dear,

What does it mean to have travelled somewhere, to know a place? Does it mean having visited all the landmarks? Does it mean taking the right photos to show to those that didn’t come? There are images online of all bigger and smaller landmarks and sights, available within a few clicks. So maybe you take a photo of yourself in front of the landmark instead. Or does presence require something more than retinal, less than spectacular? Hours and hours of walking, a kind of felt image imposed onto your flesh by repetition, again, again, feeling the pavement as it passes under your feet?


This is my fifth attempt. 


But before I start, another kind of vision: A prisoner walking inside of his cell. The prisoner is walking in circles inside of his cell imagining himself walking on the outside with his friends.


Sending you a letter digitally feels like missing an important point. It feels like cheating, in the way that seeing any place in the world, all the landscapes and all the sights, within seconds on a screen does. What does that make of travel?


It creates an illusion: this fundamental distance between us diminished, more than that: abstracted, virtualized. It’s gone to a point that even its concept is hard to grasp. This distance, it is gone and it’s there more than ever.


Even while walking along a river the present can be extrapolated with the memory of another landscape. The memory landscape laid over the actual, immediate landscape. Landscapes blurred into each other, become the same or become an unknown third thing. Disappearing distance.


1 novembre 2026 à 18:14, while walking: remind me drift, but the soles of your feet they're clapping on the floor will always ground you in the present. Connect you to the distance that your traversing a letter will show. It's show the journey. It's traveled in the MJ116 and scratches on its paper envelope make the distance somehow tangible by proxy


Four letters written, but not sent. And what difference does it make?


You will know the distance you've traveled by the pain in your ankles


She mutters the words which she knows by heart as if only to herself. Sing-song shuffling across the cold smooth marble, moving chairs, making preparations. Like something familial not godly. Or maybe its godliness is reinforced by the way that it has integrated into her very body. Faith practiced day after day after day, year after year, so many years until it lost its sharp brightness. Nearly seven decades worth of praying have settled in the lines of her face, the crevices of her brain. The words come easily, fall out of the folds of her dress shaken loose by every subtle shift of weight. Nothing and everything sanctified by words that over years traced a path on the surface of her soul like the feet of the faithful on the marble floor.


Cold and tired from my walking, I seek refuge in the cathedral. I end up staying for the evening mass. Closing my eyes I let myself be carried away by the foreign language. After shaking hands with my neighbors, I’m washed onto the church square. I find my friends outside of a small bar. The streets are narrow and dimly lit, some are steep. We eat soup and then return to the bus station where we’re happy to learn that the seats have touch screens attached to their backs. A vast catalog of films, all dubbed in Spanish, at our disposal for the next one and a half hours. I can’t figure out how to connect my wireless headphones and anyway, the curvy road soon gives me nausea, insisting on my undivided attention.


Love,

A