Photo: Sailko, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons In the tropical butterfly house in the gardens of Villa Garzoni there is a piranha. I stand staring for a few moments at the fish with the deadpan face, shimmering reddish yellow scales and huge eyes. I don’t think I’ve...
Photos by Ethan Jacobs The bookbag is a ruse, makes me look competent like I know where I’m going or what I’m doing. I don’t think anyone suspects I’m moving around with contraband: a stolen bundle of bed sheets that used to be white. By dawn, they were blotchy—red,...
Photos by Claudia Lundahl We land in Alghero and the air feels like a warm bath, tepid and gentle, soothing my senses – a corporeal lullaby that triggers an immediate shift in my mindscape. I’ve been here before, several years ago, and my body seems to remember. I...
I arrived in Antakya with my partner during Türkiye’s kurban bayramı, a week in the thick of summer that everyone takes off to celebrate Eid al-Adha. The city was sleepy and quiet, with heat rising up from the cobblestone streets. After a twelve-hour night bus from...
Photo by Sandy Wicks, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons In the weeks preceding my trip to Oslo, my father insisted I should go and see Freya. Our phone conversations kept returning to the unfortunate walrus, mirroring the ways in which she had ceaselessly returned...
Photo: lucarista / Shutterstock.com At the traffic light in front of the FAO in Rome, on a warm June night, a woman in a red FIAT 500 searches for a decent song on the radio and thinks about the grotesque date she’s just had. The man was expecting her to go to a hotel...
