Always breathe in sync with the world

I had not spoken to anybody in five days. My quiet, solitary, lush, orgasmic five days of roaming around Florence. I would walk, prance and creep until I knew every wall, street corner, every little shop and shop-owner. Then the next day I would start all over again, walking and toddling the very same streets, until I knew every shadow, loose brick, every broken glass and old maiden peeping out from behind it.
And I would listen. Every day I would listen so hard, trying to hear the town whisper its stories and the stories of its people, all of them: Italian, English, Japanese, American, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Romanian, Indian, Nigerian, Spanish and me. Me, not talking to any of them, struggling to go unnoticed, but noticing them all. I would sit at a distance, completely still, afraid I might scare them off, much like a photographer who spends months approaching a flock of birds, only one step at a time, in order to snap that one picture that will be so beautiful that it will help save the species from extinction.
I watched them walk, talk, fall in love, grow hungry, I heard them gasp for air in front of the buildings, in front of the pictures and the golden doors. And I fell in love with them all. Still, if you were to show me a picture of one of them, or of ten, or a thousand I would not recognize a single one, but that is only because to me they were one, a complex, godly, blurry image of one human being, or of a billion, whom I shortly called Florence and whom I loved that Summer, passionately, youthfully and freely, and true.
I will never forget the day one of them stole my wallet. And how I did not realize it until ten hours later, and felt angry, small and pathetic for getting so worked-up over it. And I thought about how I would announce my parents that I no longer had my ID and then I thought about how I would tell my mother that I no longer had the only photograph of her father. And then I cried. Like a scared child who got lost, like a grown man who could not remember the way back to his old home. And I fell asleep.
In the morning I got up and went on the balcony. Everything was still there. The streets, the corners and the cracks in the walls. Florence was still there in all its truth, and fairness, and might, as the day before, as always. I tried to breathe it all in and I heard my soul moan and felt my body tremble from all its joints, sweetly and uncontrollably. And then I started crying again.