The Saccades

The rooftop where we currently reside is of a shop that I walk past nearly every day, a woodwork shop which, like all of Florentine’s numerous manufacturing outlets, is small, covered in graffiti, and open for viewing of these artisans going about their craft. There is a vase with a flower on the window sill that sits abreast of our place in this wide expanse. A woman tends to her food behind the flower. We ruminate over an army of subjects, captivated at every turn. There is something about this place that makes me examine the dust of life. It breaches thoughts I thought unable to be imagined. My mind is afire.

The woman eventually snaps at the noise we were making, threatening to call the police. Guarded tolerance. I smile as we get up to leave. This city is one of contradiction, like all the best are. There is always a wrinkle to an appearance. It fascinates endlessly. The people, who make the place what it is, encapsulate such an array of themes with such a depth to each. History. Culture. Food. Music. Beach. Politics. Innovation. Women. Weather. Nightlife. Religion. Family. Accessibility. Intrigue. Complexity. Conflict. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, always interesting. These themes are layered and intertwined, like tetris pieces, with themselves and each other, trying to work in concert to find a land of no seams but inevitably catching on the friction that gives the place its texture.

We are in the backstreets of the suburb now and I hear someone playing drums in an old warehouse. I go and look through a sliver in the huge metal door for five minutes. A man up the street is arguing with his motorbike. A rooftop bar is blaring live music a couple of blocks away, and the sound finds my ears as it knows it should. There is a guy in a second floor window painting on canvas whom I can see only partially, as if leading me down the rabbit hole. I am in narrow streets surrounded by roofs at oblong angles of corrugated teeth, but the window is more a door than a window and so the brush moves in my eyes. A falafel shop around the corner provides the scent that compliments the mood. I need to get the beautiful things in my mind out of my fingers at some point. I strain to remember the feeling for my later writings. I need to flesh it out in my own mind before I can spray it to the world, fully formed. It would be heresy otherwise, the idea never vindicated.

This is the place where you write in your mind through the night.