At Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, the rain also falls upon the cracked glass of my retina. Just as it strikes my gaze, it slowly and sacredly runs down the windows and the planes of Ethiopian Airlines. It methodically gathers the words that spill onto my little notebook, and I write down the date: an ordinary day in October.

It is a line that separates two destinations: one in the past and one in the future. A few hours ago, I was melting on the asphalt of Johannesburg; in a few more hours, I will be broken and cold beneath the European skies, on my way to France. It is not so important: the Great African Rift, the impossible tropics, the Sahara, the Mediterranean, the airport lights. Much later, I too will be languishing amid the fumes of Chunghwa cigarettes as I watch Chinese businessmen pass through the scene. I will be able to melt beneath the bright spotlights announcing the airport’s synagogue and mosque, and among the elephants made of crumpled cotton on the shelves of the souvenir stands.

I will be able to be all of that, and also another passenger at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, Ethiopia.

And the layovers will no longer matter so much. And in this state of transit, I too want to be part of Ethiopian history.

A snail is a house that moves slowly, but it is always a house.

The sacrifice of a snail is the sacrifice of its own body.

Snail. House. Path. Past. Present. Future.

They are the same thing.

They are in the same place.

A snail carries its house.

Modern development carries capital across land.

The people living on the land are expected to move.

The sacrifice of the caracol is not only the destruction of its house. It is the destruction of the body that makes the house a home.

“They are destroying the relationship between the people and the land, and once that relationship is destroyed, the land can be treated as an object,” the spokesperson said.

I was sweating profusely because I had just arrived at the meeting.

I had arrived late, or almost late. The room was already full. I found a place to sit and tried to cool down while photographs of communities in Mexico passed across the screen.

I had travelled to another town to attend the meeting. The National Indigenous Congress, or CNI, was travelling through the Spanish State as part of a solidarity tour before continuing into other states of the European Union. They had come to Europe carrying stories from communities scattered across Mexico.

I knew very little about what I was going to hear.

The CNI is a coalition of Indigenous peoples of Mexico, formed on 12 October 1996. The date was chosen deliberately. It was the day Spain celebrated what was once called the “Discovery of America”, the beginning of a history that would profoundly reshape the peoples and territories of the continent.

Eight years earlier, another date had already changed the political landscape of Mexico.

On 1 January 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the EZLN, launched an armed uprising in Chiapas. Thousands of Indigenous insurgents seized several towns, including San Cristóbal de las Casas, and announced their existence to the world.

The uprising did not appear from nowhere.

The EZLN had been organising clandestinely in Chiapas since 1983. But 1994 was the moment the rebellion became impossible to ignore.

Much has been discussed, reported, written and analysed about the EZLN and its history in Mexico. We know the balaclavas, the poetry, the uprisings, the lives and deaths, the jungle, the project, the caracoles. We know the images that travelled around the world.

That is a story for another time.

This one is about the CNI.

The CNI emerged two years after the Zapatista uprising, bringing together Indigenous communities from across Mexico who were confronting different versions of the same question:

What happens when the people who live on a piece of land are no longer allowed to decide what happens to it?

The question sounds simple.

It isn’t.

Because land, as I was beginning to understand, was not being described as property.

It was being described as memory.

As identity.

As community.

As something closer to the body than to an object that can be bought, extracted from, developed, or abandoned.

And this was where the caracol began to make sense.

The snail carries its house because there is no separation between the two.

Perhaps a community can be understood in the same way.

Destroy the house, and you don’t simply remove a roof.

You begin to destroy the thing that made the house a home.

The conflict, according to the CNI, has escalated over Indigenous lands.

But listening to them, it became increasingly difficult to understand land as simply land.

They spoke about the spiritual relationship between people and the places they inhabit, and about how that relationship was being stripped away.

Land was not merely the centre of the conflict.

It was part of the identity of the people themselves.

There was an idea running underneath everything they said: the political struggle was embodied in the land, but also in the bodies of the people who lived upon it.

To remove people from the land was therefore not simply to relocate them.

It was to break something.

The CNI spoke of forced disappearances, political prisoners and communities living under what they described as a war situation.

They showed photographs, posters and postcards from the communities they represented.

Faces appeared on the screen.

Places appeared.

People who had been murdered, disappeared, imprisoned or displaced became more than numbers.

The message was difficult to misunderstand.

They believed there was a war against Indigenous communities in Mexico.

According to the CNI, the Mexican government, elements of the military and drug-trafficking organisations were involved in different ways, producing what they described as a situation of permanent violence with humanitarian and ecological consequences.

They gave figures.

Forty-five people had disappeared.

Two hundred and fourteen had been murdered.

One hundred and seven were being held in Mexican prisons, whom the CNI considered political prisoners.

They also spoke of connections between criminal organisations and the Mexican government, which they said had been demonstrated through different cases.

One of the people they mentioned was Jesús Plácido, an activist from a cell associated with the CNI. According to the CNI, he had been kidnapped by the Mexican army and was currently serving a prison sentence.

These were not presented as isolated incidents.

They were part of the same landscape.

A landscape in which the relationship between a community and its territory could be attacked from several directions at once: through violence, through criminal organisations, through government policy, through economic development, or simply through the gradual transformation of the land into something that could be bought, extracted, developed and sold.

Perhaps this was why the history of the CNI mattered.

The organisation emerged at a time when Indigenous communities were confronting the continued erosion of their languages, cultures and identities through the standardising power of the Mexican State.

Spanish had been imposed over Indigenous languages, and Indigenous people had historically been punished for speaking their own languages.

The CNI brought together what it describes as sixty-eight original peoples of Mexico.

Their demand was not simply recognition.

It was autonomy.

They wanted Indigenous communities to be able to decide for themselves what happened to their territories, their languages, their cultures and their futures.

In 2001, agreements that had been expected to produce political changes for Indigenous communities failed to materialise. The communities involved considered themselves betrayed.

The lesson they drew from this was not that the wrong person had been in power.

It was almost the opposite.

No matter who the ruler is, resistance will always arise.

The problem, in other words, was not simply the individual occupying the presidential palace.

It was the structure around him.

This was reflected in the way the CNI itself operated.

The organisation works with and within community assemblies. Agreements, deals and decisions are expected to be collectively discussed and collectively approved.

There is no single person who can simply decide on behalf of everyone else.

At one point, they had even considered launching a presidential campaign themselves.

The idea was not simply to win an election and replace one ruler with another.

Their strategy was supposed to be communicated to all the communities involved, decentralising power and ensuring that decisions could be taken through the agreement of the people themselves.

They were unable to make it happen.

Around that time, Andrés Manuel López Obrador entered government.

But for the CNI, the arrival of another president did not resolve the underlying problem.

The ruler had changed.

The struggle had not.

And perhaps this was where their idea of autonomy became more concrete.

Because the conflict was not only about political representation.

It was about who gets to decide what land is for.

The CNI is now celebrating thirty years of existence.

For this anniversary, they have been calling people to organise against what they describe as “zones of sacrifice.”

The phrase stayed with me.

A sacrifice zone is a place where people live, but where the people themselves become secondary to whatever the land can produce.

The territory is transformed into an industrial zone, an extraction zone, a mining project, an oil-producing area, or a mass tourism destination.

The inhabitants become an inconvenience.

The land has value.

The people living on it do not.

The CNI argues that European, American and Canadian companies are attempting to take control of territories across Mexico, particularly through mining projects.

They also spoke about plans by the Mexican State to develop strategic zones between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific coast, including industrial special zones and large-scale tourism projects along the coastline.

These projects may arrive carrying the language of development.

Infrastructure.

Investment.

Employment.

Public utility.

Modernisation.

But the CNI asks a simpler question.

Who benefits?

They showed examples of Indigenous resistance through a project called Resistance Mirrors, documenting communities that had opposed these projects and, in some cases, managed to stop them.

Resistance, therefore, was not presented merely as an act of desperation.

Sometimes it worked.

Sometimes the project did not happen.

Sometimes a community managed to say no.

One of the communities represented during the European tour was the Chontal people. The main representative travelling with the delegation came from this community and had been elected as a spokesperson by the CNI.

His presence gave the tour a particular weight.

These were not people travelling around Europe to explain an abstract political theory.

They were carrying the experiences of communities.

They were carrying their photographs, their demands, their dead, their imprisoned and disappeared, their territories.

And they were carrying the question of what happens when somebody else decides that the place where you live would be more profitable if you were no longer there.

They gave another example from Oaxaca.

There is an oil refinery there that, according to the CNI, has produced serious pollution in the surrounding area.

The contradiction they described was almost absurd.

Companies can profit from the extraction of resources, while the communities living nearby can still lose something as basic as electricity when it rains.

The resource leaves.

The profit leaves.

The consequences remain.

Again, the phrase returned:

“Sacrifice zones.”

Who benefits from the extraction?

And who pays for it?

The CNI’s answer to this problem is partly contained in the way these communities understand ownership itself.

They spoke about the idea of social property, which they said represents around 51 percent of Indigenous land.

Land is not understood simply as an individual possession.

Its administration is based on communal rules and collective responsibility.

Those who work the land are also responsible for it.

Decisions concerning it must be discussed in an assembly.

The community decides.

This system of collective organisation has allowed some communities to resist and dismantle foreign and national investment projects.

The land cannot simply be sold by one person because the land does not belong to one person.

It belongs to a community.

Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the community belongs to the land as much as the land belongs to the community.

The same struggle appears in places where the threat does not arrive in the form of a foreign mining company.

The CNI spoke about the avocado industry and the way drug-trafficking organisations have seized control of parts of the market.

Farmers can be forced from their land through criminal violence.

The cartel does not necessarily need to own the territory in the conventional sense.

It only needs to make remaining there impossible.

The communities resist these practices too, confronting what the CNI described as Mafia-like structures operating around agriculture and local economies.

Again, the question is not simply who owns the land.

It is who can remain on it.

Who can work it.

Who can make decisions about it.

Who benefits from it.

And who is expected to disappear when somebody more powerful decides that the land should be used for something else.

The CNI also spoke about constitutional reform.

They wanted to reform Article 2 of the Mexican Constitution, which stipulates that the Mexican nation is multicultural in composition and recognises the rights of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples and communities to self-determination and autonomy.

But they were deeply sceptical about the government’s proposed process.

The government, they said, wanted to consult approximately three thousand Indigenous communities in thirty days.

To the CNI, this was not a serious attempt to resolve either the historical problems or the new problems confronting Indigenous communities.

Thirty days to listen to thousands of communities.

Thirty days to understand territories, languages, histories, conflicts and demands.

Thirty days to decide what should happen to people whose relationship with their land may have existed for centuries.

It seemed almost designed to produce an answer before anyone had properly heard the question.

And beneath all of this was the constitution itself.

The constitution establishes the limits of sovereignty.

But between the written limits of sovereignty and the reality of political power, the CNI sees rampant corruption.

Public utility, they argued, repeatedly ends up benefiting the state, contractors and those who subsidise or finance the projects rather than the communities whose lives are directly affected by them.

The road is built.

The mine opens.

The refinery operates.

The tourist complex arrives.

The electricity network is expanded.

The investment is celebrated.

And somewhere beneath all of this, the people who already lived there are asked to adjust.

Or leave.

Or disappear.

Yet the CNI did not speak as if resistance were something that belonged only to the past.

They spoke about it as something that would continue.

No matter who rules.

No matter which party occupies government.

No matter which company arrives.

No matter how much money is offered.

The resistance remains.

The CNI will keep resisting.

It was getting late.

I had to leave for the station.

It was my last train.

I said goodbye hurriedly and began walking.

By the time I was sitting inside the train, I felt a strange kind of lethargy. The day had been unbearably hot. I rested my head against the window and watched the territory pass by.

And then I began to see what the CNI representatives had been talking about.

Industrial structures.

Massive farms.

Wind turbines.

Solar panels covering stretches of land.

Logistics platforms.

Data centres and the infrastructure of foreign companies.

This was what they had noticed while travelling through the territory. They had been speaking with people along the way, listening to what they had seen and what had happened to their communities.

They also knew that this land had once spoken another language.

Of course, the differences between an Indigenous community in Mexico and a territory in Europe are enormous.

The distances between the two oceans are not merely geographical.

Comparisons can be unfair.

But I found myself thinking about what they had seen before arriving here.

And what they had thought about it.

I wondered whether their situation was not, in some deeper sense, a version of something that happens everywhere.

Not the same story.

Not the same violence.

Not the same history.

But perhaps the same root.

Like one deep root beneath an enormous tree, branching into places that appear completely unrelated.

Capital adapts to change faster than communities do.

That much seemed obvious.

Capital can move.

It can cross borders, change industries, abandon one territory and enter another.

Communities cannot move so easily.

They carry their dead.

Their languages.

Their memories.

Their houses.

Their fields.

Their cemeteries.

Their stories.

But then another question came to me as the train moved through the darkening landscape.

What happens to the land?

I thought of another caracol from the other side of the Pyrenees.

In the Landes, in southwestern France, there is an old Gascon legend about Lou Carcolh, a gigantic snail-like creature said to live beneath the hill of Hastingues. Its shell was said to be as deep as a house. Those who ventured too close could be dragged inside by its tentacles.

I liked the idea that somewhere beyond the border, the snail had become a monster.

Perhaps every house becomes frightening when someone tries to take it away.

And I thought of that saying: “Snail, with your little house on your back, you don’t pay rent.”

A great cloud opened beneath the last rays of the summer sun, flooding the buildings under construction on the outskirts of the city with light.

The cloud took the shape of a caracol.

I stayed there watching the light until night fell.

I don’t like nations. I like survivors. I like betting on losing dogs.

Eskorbuto were playing in my headphones as the bus entered Madrid, the capital of the Spanish State. They were singing it forty years ago:

Este maldito país es una gran pocilga.

This damned country is a great pigsty.

Maldito país. España.

Damned country. Spain.

Outside the window, new apartment buildings were rising everywhere. Concrete, glass, balconies stacked one above another, cranes suspended over the city. More homes appearing in a city that already seemed to have too many people and not enough places for them to live. I watched them go by and wondered: why would anyone want to live here?

It was not really a question about Madrid. I knew why people came and why people kept being born here. Work. Money. Universities. Love. Ambition. The usual reasons we give for moving towards a city. I meant something else. Why would anyone want to build their life inside this? Another tower. Another development. Another collection of apartments waiting to become somebody’s investment, somebody’s rent, somebody’s mortgage.

Maldito país. España.

The bus kept moving. I was entering the capital of the country whose passport I carried, listening to a Basque punk band calling Spain a pigsty, and for once the contradiction didn’t seem particularly contradictory.

I probably would never have come to Madrid on my own. Not because I had anything against the city. I simply knew it mostly as a place to leave Spain from, through Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport. This time, I had a reason to stay.

A Mexican friend was there.

Perhaps that was why Madrid already felt foreign.

It has always been foreign to me.

For a long time, I think my identity was somewhere in the Pyrenees. Not in Spain. Not particularly in Aragón, either.

My father took me there when I was a child. I grew up with the mountains, the green valleys, the rain, the snow covering the roads in winter. The Pyrenees never felt like a border to me. They were simply there. Basque, Aragonese, Occitan, Catalan — different languages, different histories, different peoples, divided between two states. But the mountains did not seem to care.

I crossed the French border without feeling that I had really left the landscape behind. I remember the chocolate factory at Oloron-Sainte-Marie, berets and bagpipes, old Aragonese names written on signs and spoken by people whose voices seemed to carry something older than the states that governed them. This was the geography I knew before I knew what nationalism was.

Perhaps that is why I have never understood the need to choose a flag.

I have nostalgia for the Pyrenees. But I don’t think I belong to them. There is a difference. The places that made me who I was never asked me to belong to them.

But time takes things without announcing itself. The names disappear. The factories change. The people grow old. The snow comes later, or not at all. And eventually you return and realise that the landscape you thought had been waiting for you has been moving on without you.

Perhaps that is what I have been mourning all these years.

Not a country.

A landscape.

And the person who existed inside it.

A few days earlier, I had gone to the administration to submit a poetry book in Aragonese for a literary competition. The first thing they asked me was whether it was written in “fabla”, a dismissive word often used for the Aragonese language. Then they asked why I didn’t have an electronic national ID card.

I told the woman that I had left Spain a long time ago. She explained that I could get one and use it to access the website. I told her it didn’t really matter. I was leaving the country anyway. I just wanted to submit my book.

She didn’t seem to like that.

There was something almost absurd about the exchange. I had walked into an Aragonese office carrying a book written in a language from the place I came from, and somehow the more important question was whether I possessed the right piece of plastic proving that I belonged to the Spanish state.

I have always had a weakness for losers.

Negu Gorriak singing Gaberako aterbea in Basque. Nadau playing at the Olympia in Paris, singing about the search for the immortal flower that grows only in the valleys. Kneecap making a film about working-class lads in Belfast, switching between Irish and English as naturally as the city itself. A Welsh film about a poet who died in Flanders, unable to write to his family in the language he loved. Zapatista communities in Mexico moving between Spanish and Indigenous languages. The Ainu in northern Japan, carrying a language that was once pushed towards silence. And somewhere in Australia, a language with a grammar so elaborate it had dozens of cases, spoken by only a handful of people.

Different languages. Different histories. Different ways of being pushed to the edge.

Perhaps that is why I wrote the book in Aragonese. Not because I wanted another flag. Because I wanted to participate in something that had survived long enough for me to find it.

I have always bet on losing dogs. Not because I expect them to win, but because I like seeing them still running.

I have carried pieces of places with me. In France, I encountered Occitan in everyday life. At the school where I worked as an assistant, some of the children were euskaldunak. I would greet them in Euskera, even though French was the language I was supposed to speak with them. Not because I wanted to become Basque or Occitan or anything else. I simply liked the idea that a place could leave something behind in you.

Perhaps that is what culture means to me. Not something you inherit and then defend with a flag, but something you encounter and decide to carry.

I would have written the poetry collection in Navajo if I had been given the chance. I don’t need a culture to tell me who I am before I allow myself to love it.

That is different from nationalism.

Nationalism asks:

Who are you?

And then gives you the answer.

I have always preferred another question:

What moved you?

And then I carry it with me.

On the way home, I lost my Spanish DNI.

For three days, I didn’t care.

A friend eventually found it inside a bar and gave it back to me. I felt no particular relief. Only gratitude that I wouldn’t have to explain its disappearance to the police.

It surprised me how little I cared about losing a document so closely tied to identity. Being regarded as Spanish has never mattered that much to me. What matters are the things that come with it: the freedom to move, to live and work elsewhere in Europe, to cross borders without thinking about them.

I am as grateful for those things as I feel angry knowing that this right is refused to others.

But that is not the same as loving the country.

I have never particularly liked Spain.

I like the people underneath the state. The people I have actually met. The people I have shared meals with, worked with, argued with, loved, or simply passed on the street.

But how am I supposed to feel attached to a country made up of millions of people I will never know? You don’t know everyone from your country. You don’t even know everyone from your region. You don’t know everyone in your city.

At some point, nationalism asks you to make a leap.

These are your people.

Why?

Because they happen to have the same passport.

I have never understood that leap.

I care about people I know. I care about places I have seen. I care about languages I have heard and decided to carry with me. The state can tell me what I am on paper. It cannot tell me what moved me.

And I don’t want another identity to replace the one I am rejecting. I don’t want a Spanish identity, an Aragonese identity, a Basque identity, a Catalan identity, or any other identity imposed from above to swallow the small things I actually love about places.

I would defend their languages. Their histories. Their particularities. The small and stubborn things that make a place itself.

But I become suspicious when those things are handed over to administrations.

Administrations know how to turn culture into capital. A language becomes a campaign. A tradition becomes a tourism slogan. A flag becomes a photograph. An identity becomes a constituency.

What was once lived becomes something that can be managed, branded and sold back to the people who produced it.

Perhaps this is why nationalism has never felt like home to me. It asks me to lose myself inside something larger and more permanent.

The nation.

The region.

The people.

The flag.

I have always been more interested in smaller things: a street I remember, a language someone speaks to their grandmother, a cemetery beside my parents’ house, a bus that doesn’t come, a place where rats still know how to survive.

Those things do not need to tell me who I am.

They simply remind me where I have been.

I enjoyed my time in Madrid. Six hours around Retiro Park, Lavapiés and Atocha with my friend S. were more than enough.

We hadn’t seen each other in years. I enjoyed his presence. We walked through the park and watched the Fallen Angel statue slowly disappear into the midday heat.

The city itself didn’t interest me that much. But I was glad I had come.

Perhaps that was enough.

A place does not have to become yours for the people you meet there to matter.

After lunch, S. accompanied me to the bus station.

I headed north.

Madrid disappeared.

The sunset was hitting the Sierra de Madrid as the bus left the city behind. I put on Zootopia and one of Eskorbuto’s albums.

There was something strange about watching a children’s film while listening to a band that had spent forty years telling Spain to fuck off.

The mountains appeared in the distance.

Then Zaragoza.

Aragón.

It was late when I arrived.

The first thing I saw was the giant Spanish flag projected on the bridge. I knew that bridge. Years ago, I had seen it in a video for an anti-racist rap song. The same city. The same concrete. The same river underneath it.

Now the flag projected above it was enormous.

I stood there looking at it and thought about the people in Ceuta.

Some weeks ago, thousands of migrants had arrived in the city after crossing from Morocco. The language around them had quickly become the language of invasion. People marched under Spanish flags and demanded that the border be defended.

The Spanish Popular Party had won the election in my region.

An election I hadn’t wanted, and hadn’t voted in.

I had been away.

Still, somehow, the result belonged to me.

I had spent the day walking through Madrid with a Mexican friend I hadn’t seen in years. I had spent the previous weeks thinking about languages that had survived borders and states. I have spent so many years away.

And now, arriving home, I was standing beneath a flag telling me who belonged here.

There were not enough buses.

I had to wait.

By the time I finally made it back to my neighbourhood, it was quiet. The streets smelled of rubbish. There were rats. They moved between the buildings as if they had always been there.

Perhaps they had.

Rats don’t care about flags. They don’t care which country the street belongs to, or which language is written on the signs. They know when a ship is sinking. They leave before everyone else.

Sometimes the rats survive while the good men die.

Sometimes the rats get rich.

Perhaps that is what survival looks like when nobody is keeping score.

The neighbourhood had been decaying for years. The old buildings were tired. The places that once gave the area a purpose had disappeared. And underneath it all was another history.

This had once been a concentration camp.

My grandfather had been there.

And, apparently, so had the grandparents of the rats now running through the neighbourhood.

So, in a way, we were almost family.

The city had changed. The people had changed. The buildings had changed.

The rats remained.

I watched them disappear into the darkness and thought about losing dogs. About languages that refused to disappear. About the Pyrenees, where the mountains had never cared which country they were supposed to belong to. About the flag above the river. About the card in my pocket that said I was Spanish.

The rats didn’t care about any of it.

Perhaps that was why I understood them.

I fell asleep.

Some summers, winter strikes again.

There, at the end of the alleyway. It is like most things: unattended. The wind, and all the sacred things that come with it.

What I remember about wintertime France was not the cold, nor the rain. It was the loneliness that seemed to scratch at the façades, no matter how hard I tried to escape it; the loneliness dripping from windows, no matter how hard I tried to gather my bones and carry myself towards the ochre sunset.

Winter used to be the season of comfort.

I say “used to be” because, I reckon, I always enjoyed crushing the dry leaves beneath my feet, mixing and stirring them into a colourful broken puzzle until a sudden blow of air would take them away from me.

I used to be a poet in wintertime France.

A sunken poet in the muddy woods of some provincial road, trying to escape from myself and everything else.

In the humid Atlantic south of France, between the Basque coast and the high valleys of the Pyrenees, lay the small Béarnese city where I lived.

Many afternoons, I would return to my little studio there. The fragile purple contrasts of the Pyrenees, marking the French border, showed me the double, sickly colours of the horizon. Beyond the snow was the country where I had been born; here, the yellowish reflection of the sunset seemed to have been torn from the mountains and placed inside my eyes.

The railway station melted into winter and gathered the tears of ice-covered branches hanging from the Empire-style roofs. Two French tricolours fluttered above them, superimposed against the sunset.

They were worn.

As worn as the country.

Pau was provincial, sleepy and, to me at least, almost painfully boring. It was not, in fact, a rich city. Today, almost a quarter of its population lives below the poverty line, a striking figure in a region that can otherwise appear prosperous beneath the mountains.

And yet this was Béarn, a region whose landscape had once been transformed by the enormous wealth of the Lacq gas field.

The contradiction stayed with me.

A small city beneath the Pyrenees, apparently comfortable and unremarkable, carrying a history of industrial wealth and yet, at the railway station, people were sleeping because they had nowhere else to go.

I remember finding this difficult to understand.

Perhaps nowhere is not the absence of wealth.

Perhaps nowhere is what happens when wealth, housing and belonging stop belonging to the same place.

Every time I stepped down from the train, covered in melting snow, every time my feet struck the worn, grey floors of the station, I thought of my mother’s smile.

I thought, too, about the fact that one day those journeys home, and that smile upon returning to the only true homeland - or matria, the person from whom you are born - would come to an abrupt and unforeseen end, simply because all things are mortal.

All those strange winter journeys, while rain fell somewhere far away over the mountain peaks, would one day no longer be necessary. There would be nowhere to go, nowhere to return to.

The only constant was the mountains.

My life among them would slowly unravel.

I wanted to catch the exact second when the train turned sharply towards the depths of the valley. I wanted to capture the certainty that there would always be a smile waiting at the end of the journey, a pair of intense eyes listening for the sound of the keys and the half-open door, where footsteps were recognised without effort.

I wanted that cold, safe station to always exist, too — so safe that it could become almost oppressive.

The smell of embers scattered through the chimneys of French homes.

The winter light.

The mountains.

And, ultimately, a house.

When I returned to France after the winter holidays, I stepped off the train and saw the SDF.

Sans domicile fixe.

Another acronym among so many others, the kind that governments produce to make misfortune administratively manageable.

People without a fixed address.

People without a fixed home.

People without somewhere to return to.

The French state speaks often of its republican values, of liberty, equality and fraternity. Yet some citizens seem to matter more than others.

Some citizens are not necessary to cities.

Some people become inconvenient when they no longer participate in the productive and consumer fabric of society.

And some of those people become citizens of the station.

This is not a new idea. Much has been written about the way cities defend themselves against the people they no longer want: hostile architecture, benches designed so that nobody can sleep on them, spaces made uncomfortable enough to keep certain bodies moving.

We could talk about the benches of Camden in London, United Kingdom.

We could talk about the Tchaikovsky broadcast through the platforms of suburban Høje Taastrup in Zealand, Denmark, discouraging people from lingering.

We could talk about the sharp, jagged silhouettes of the shops around the Gare de Lyon in Paris.

We could talk about all of it.

But this is Pau.

A small, boring provincial city in the outer reaches of the French state, where the most exciting thing that can happen is watching a horse escape through the streets or an otter drift down the current of the gave, as the rivers are called around there.

And perhaps that is precisely why I noticed.

There was nothing spectacular about it.

No enormous metropolis.

No sprawling slum.

No spectacular skyline hiding spectacular inequality.

Just a small city beneath the mountains, and people sleeping inside its railway station.

The threat of capital is homelessness.

The promise of “humanising” work becomes, in the end, the dehumanisation of the non-inhabitant — the invisibility of those who no longer have a recognised place within the spaces we have built for ourselves.

Perhaps this is one of the fears that capitalism and the state quietly propose to us:

You could end up like them, too.

It is an old form of social control. Keep moving. Keep working. Keep consuming. Keep your rent paid. Keep your door closed.

Otherwise, you might become one of them.

A variation of Sartre’s “hell is other people”, perhaps.

Except that otherness has never been foreign to me.

Not even here.

Not even in this station.

I am a stranger too - a stranger with a foreign roof over my head, one that I pay for by answering to the demands of the French state.

The difference was simply that I had somewhere else to go.

The footsteps around me quickened.

The city’s funicular had already gone to sleep. Railway workers played with the keys to the carriages, while the station agents, dressed in their strangely decadent railway kepis, called out to me:

“Eh! Dépêche-toi! La gare va fermer!”

I had never realised that a station made up of two platforms and a tunnel could close.

“Okay, okay, j’arrive.”

I left the territory of the station with my empty backpack.

I had brought nothing from home except cigarettes.

I don’t think I needed anything else.

The station closed behind me.

Outside, Pau continued to exist exactly as it always had.

The mountains remained where they were.

The lights came on in the windows.

Somewhere, someone returned home.

Somewhere else, someone had nowhere to go.

This is a story of winter in France, but it has also been a story of Malmö, a story of Tokyo, a story of Cape Town, a story of everywhere, and of nowhere.

Because nowhere is not necessarily a place.

Sometimes it is a condition.

Sometimes it is the absence of a door.

Sometimes it is the space between being allowed to belong somewhere and being asked to leave.

And sometimes it is a railway station after midnight, when the lights are going out and the last people are being told to move along.

I used to think that winter was comforting because everything seemed to disappear beneath it.

The roads became empty.

The mountains became distant.

The world became quieter.

Now I wonder whether winter only makes visible what was already there.

The people sleeping beneath the station roofs.

The homes we are afraid of losing.

The doors we keep closed.

The strangers we pass without seeing.

The country we return to, hoping it will still recognise us.

Perhaps nowhere is not the absence of home.

Perhaps nowhere is what happens when a home exists, but not for everyone.

I have never been to The City. Yet I know its streets better than I know some places where I have actually lived. And I have sometimes wondered whether you can feel nostalgia for somewhere that never existed.

I would call it Phantalgia — from the phantom of fantasy and nostalgia.

I remember the first time I entered it. It was raining. The streets were almost empty, and the light from the windows fell onto the wet stones. The Clock Tower rises above the fog enveloping the city, and beneath my footsteps the murmur of its mechanical entrails slowly rises through the cornices and faint shutters. Only the tinkling of gas lamps breaks the darkness and silence.

I can hear every word spoken by the citizens behind the city’s ancient, massive walls. The rain intensifies the sound of the factory gears, and as it strikes the wet, dark pavements, it joins the bells of the Clock Tower. It is midnight now, the wolf hour.

In the distance, the sounds of the Docks move towards the Stonemarket, and I follow them. Hidden in the shadows, because in the city darkness is my room, and my room is darkness.

The way home is harder than ever, despite knowing every turn and every door that must be passed through. I move wrapped in darkness and rain, avoiding every encounter until I reach the Clock Tower, a refuge for day and night.

Then I lie down in bed and extinguish the candles.

The city twists and I carry my eyes inside it. And slowly, the lines between us become confused.

Device battery: 10%.

The truth is that the City does not exist, and I don’t remember the City so much as I remember myself inside it.

I know this because I have spent countless hours walking through it from one room to another, from one apartment to another, from one country to another, always through my laptop screen.

The City is the setting of a videogame called Thief.

I have returned to this videogame for more than a decade, from rooms in Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Cape Town, and elsewhere.

A videogame where a shadow becomes a room.

The beautiful thing about The City is that I could leave it for three years and return to find that it had been waiting for me.

I wonder if nostalgia requires reality.

I left home once to become a stranger elsewhere, and eventually came back to discover that I had become a stranger at home too. But The City was different. Inside it, I had remained remarkably unchanged. Perhaps I was an avatar. Perhaps simply another character moving through a world that had somehow preserved me.

Real cities don’t do this. You leave an apartment and someone else eventually lives there. A café closes. A street is renovated. A building disappears. A landscape changes slowly enough that you only notice when you return.

The City doesn’t.

Its Clock Tower still rises above the streets. The same windows glow at night. The same alleys remain hidden beneath the same rain. It was never quite like the places I had lived, although its Clock Tower always reminded me of the one at Copenhagen City Hall. The City felt less like a historical place than someone’s memory of history — distorted, fragmented, half-remembered.

Perhaps that is why I could return.

You can leave a videogame for years and come back to find that nothing has moved.

A videogame can become a private geography of your life.

I know this because I have carried The City with me for more than a decade. I have walked through it from rooms in different countries, through the small illuminated rectangle of my laptop screen. Sometimes I was in Paris. Sometimes Copenhagen. Sometimes Tokyo. Sometimes Cape Town. The City remained the same while everything around me changed.

The last time I played, I was going through a breakup.

There was one mission I remember with particular discomfort. Garrett has to spy on people in the privacy of their bedroom, watching something intimate from the darkness. I had just ended a relationship, and the voyeurism of the scene made me strangely miserable. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be looking at somebody else’s intimacy.

I wanted the person who wasn’t there anymore.

For a moment, the fiction became more uncomfortable than reality. I wanted to leave the game, but I couldn’t if I wanted to continue its story. And yet I kept playing.

Because perhaps I wasn’t playing to complete the mission.

I wasn’t playing to achieve anything.

I just wanted to exist somewhere else for an hour.

And there was Erin.

Erin, the girl who disappears and sets much of the story in motion. I found myself worrying about her in a way that was difficult to separate entirely from the life I was living outside the screen.

Erin reminded me of someone I had once wanted to protect from the shadows of a city, too. The fracture between Garrett and Erin stirred echoes of my own breakup. Their relationship became entangled, somewhere in my mind, with something I had just lost.

It sounds strange to say that I worried about a fictional character.

But perhaps that is precisely what fiction does. It gives our feelings somewhere else to live.

The City itself stretches from the gargoyle-studded mansions of Auldale to the stony expanses of the Old Quarter. Every city is a reflection of the spirit of its time, but The City feels as though every one of its roots belongs to an ancient and colossal tree beneath the ground, its branches reaching into every life within it.

It is dark, narrow, dangerous and lethal.

And yet I don’t think I have ever found a better place to belong.

There is a strange comfort in that paradox. I sink into the silence announced by the zinc rooftops, into the voices drifting through the alleyways, into the rain falling somewhere beyond the walls.

Perhaps The City is a mirror.

Not of the person we actually are, but of the person we are forced to become when nobody is looking. A vulnerable and strangely honest reflection of ourselves.

And perhaps that is why I kept returning.

I don’t miss Erin.

At least, I don’t think I do.

I miss the person I was when I was worried about Erin.

The person sitting alone in a room somewhere in the world, watching rain fall over a city that had never existed.

Perhaps I don’t miss The City either.

Perhaps I miss myself inside it.

I left home because I thought it would still be there when I came back.

And now, a decade later, I am standing before a burning Aragonese landscape.

More than a landscape, it is a memory. It is the sacred, cold drop that numbs my face on an October morning. It is like a badly rooted habit. A photograph of my grandfather, whom I never knew, standing on the battlements of a castle in his black beret and black jumper. It is a mountain house where the only inhabitants are the ashes disappearing into the wind outside on the hillside. My family has always had the custom of giving the ashes back to the wind when someone dies.

It is my past.

And the fire standing before it. What remains of myself is inside that fire.

And it is burning again.

A week ago, on Monday, 10 August 2026, a fire broke out in the area of Riglos, back in Aragon, in northern Spain. My grandfather’s mountain cottage is just behind the river that cuts vertically and deeply through the gorge separating Riglos from Agüero, jumping between the cliffs and climbing through the woods until it reaches Luenga Peak.

I have lived in that place. When I was little, my father would take me there to learn how to climb those vertical walls. Years later, I would cross the outline of the frozen river and the transparency of the yellow leaves of late autumn to travel to and from Paris on the train that reaches the border. After the tunnel, the ravines and peaks unfold, the train slows down and moves along the contours of the reservoir. My father also travelled on that train, when its speed was once so slow that you could get off and back onto it without losing your breath as it crossed the avenue of iron lined with the wet trees of the pond. On that train, both then and now, all my years are there, outside and inside.

The fire is out of control.

How can I remember somewhere that is disappearing?

How can I remember myself when I am disappearing too?

A few days ago, the fire threatened the surrounding villages and their inhabitants were evacuated. The remains of the Aragonese kings buried in the ancient monastery of San Juan were evacuated too, and like everyone else, the loss is more than everything we can see.

The past has been saved, the present has been halted, and the future has dissipated.

The most absolute loss is fire.

An Ash Wednesday, similar to the one T. S. Eliot described.

It is not only all of this that goes into the fire, everything we have lost among the forests and the animals. It is also the first circumstantial wound of a long walk, the inexplicable vertigo of the fall, the weight of winter and of the years crushed beneath the railway tracks, memory, time, exile, madness, French crossword puzzles, uncomfortable and private questions, escape, fear, half of indifference, return.

I am also in the fire: an eight-year-old boy, somewhat sad, at a funeral, sitting in my grandfather’s house while my parents scatter the ashes and the wind carries all the memories away.

In the fire are the red clouds flying over the river and staining it red.

The ashes fall upon the French peaks, kilometres away.

All the memory of everything I have ever been.

The fire has changed, and so have I.

I am afraid that, for me, everything may have been lost.

Who creates a human being, if not their time? And what is important to remember from that time? What places have the right, or the power, to remember who we were, to imagine what we will become?

The fire has taken my memories. Any of them.

It is like looking through the window of a train inside a tunnel, and in your reflection, covered in light, being unable to recognise yourself.

When I was little, I had a sheep in the Sahara.

Many times, my parents asked me if I wanted to go and see her one day, since I did not live there, and I would tell them yes. That I would like to, someday. But I never asked myself why I had a sheep in the Sahara, or why it mattered to me to own something I had never seen.

A sheep is a soft, woolly animal. Something you can almost fluff beneath the weight of your hands. And yet, to me, a sheep was simply something invisible, something that existed somewhere in the Sahara, thousands of kilometres from my home in Europe.

I had a sheep, but I never really stopped to wonder what I wanted with a sheep I had never seen. Why do we want things? Why do we desire something simply because we know that it belongs to us? Perhaps for some future flock, or sometimes because that something settles deep inside us and becomes an anchor tying us to our past.

Everything we desire. Everything we do not know.

How would I know how to look after that sheep? The heat of the Sahara must be unbearable. And what would I do when I couldn’t speak Arabic? I had never lived away from home. A seven-year-old boy with his sheep in the Sahara?

“I’m sorry, Daniel. I’ve sold her.”

“Why?”

“Well, she was already very old.”

“But... you told me she was my sheep.”

“Yes, but don’t worry. When you come, you’ll have another one.”

“Will you send me pictures of her when you go back?”

“Of course.”

L. smiled. And I still didn’t understand why I would always have a new sheep in the Sahara. I didn’t understand why he would sell her either. To be honest, I didn’t even know where El Aaiún was, L.’s home. I didn’t understand why he came to visit us once a year from Germany. Nor did I understand what connected L. to my family.

El Aaiún is a city in Western Sahara.

And Western Sahara is... well, it isn’t.

It is something like the sheep.

The history of the desert is older than the sky, and throughout the centuries men, civilisations, power and rain appear and disappear. The forces of humanity and the weaknesses of nature. All of it contained within a grain of sand.

I think my uncle must have thought something similar when, in the early 1970s, he was sent to Western Sahara as a teacher. He had been born in the former Protectorate, and now he had been sent to the fifty-third province of the Spanish state.

Western Sahara was, at the time, a province, and as such Spanish authorities and their citizens inhabited places that children like L. believed to be far removed from the words being spoken far from the desert, in the baroque and gloomy offices of Madrid, Paris, Tangier, Washington and Algiers.

On 6 November 1975, a great cloud of dust swept across the Sahara. I suppose that, at that moment, the sounds of the Green March had not yet reached the school my uncle and L. shared, teacher and pupil respectively. The great cloud of the Green March was a testimony, a swan song for one colonial power and a great leap of faith into the future for another colonial power. For L., as for many other Sahrawis, that November day would be one of the first last days of his youth. Weeks later, he would no longer return to school, nor would my uncle. The Spanish authorities abandoned the Sahara. My uncle saw the desert for the last time from a ship bound for the Canary Islands while Moroccan and Mauritanian authorities divided and occupied the territory, arresting many Sahrawis, including L.

The connections between a schoolboy and the Polisario Front or the Sahrawi Liberation Movement did not need to be proven, because the destruction of a place’s childhood is also the destruction of its future. The imprisonment and subsequent expulsion of its citizens would turn the idea of creating a Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic into nothing more than another mirage in the desert. Beyond the negotiating tables and the expulsions, one thing was clear: L. was in prison, like many other Sahrawis. My uncle was expelled to Europe. Both of them left the Sahara.

Europe, despite its proximity, has traditionally isolated itself spiritually from Africa, only reaching its hands through the window when necessary, or opening the peephole to see what was happening without responding. The Old Continent fell silent when the mother continent became an inconvenient and noisy neighbour that would not allow it to rest in its European garden. In 2022, Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, compared the European Union to a “garden” and the rest of the world to a “jungle”. The African jungle and the European garden looked at one another. The jungle threatened to destroy the beautiful botanical parks and the perfect, black and frozen waters Rimbaud once wrote about; meanwhile, the garden closed itself off more and more, and its lush gates were also made from African materials.

I have often wondered what happened during those decades when L. was held in a Moroccan prison. What went through his head? How did he experience it? Did the turmoil of occupation and war also exist inside the prison? Because displacement existed both inside and outside its walls.

Years later, I learned that, after being released, now a grown man, he began travelling to Germany. There, he would buy second-hand cars and drive them across Europe to El Aaiún, where he would sell them. There, in the Saharan city, he married and had children.

El Aaiún is the de jure capital of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

Tifariti is the provisional capital of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.Rabouni is its capital in exile.

As for me, I did not discover any of this until I was well into my adolescence, roughly the same age at which he had been imprisoned. We never spoke about any of it when he came to visit us. We talked about the journey, the French roads, the snow at the border, his family, how much I had grown and, of course, the sheep.

Meanwhile, far away from Europe, in Tindouf, Algeria, his fellow Sahrawis remained and remain isolated by a great wall of landmines built by the Moroccan state decades ago. The Sahrawi people are divided by that long wall cutting across the desert.

I think it is easy to build walls in the desert, but not around its people. Perhaps that is why the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic has endured on the margins of History for so long, waiting for its day to come.

“Well, I’m afraid I have to get going. It’s getting late.”

“Come back and visit us soon.”

“Of course. I’ll call you when I’m back around here.”

“Next time, you could bring the sheep so I can see her.”

“I’m sorry, Daniel. I think it would be better if you came to see her.”

“You see, the sheep was born in the Sahara, and she wouldn’t be happy if she wasn’t there with her family.”

“Of course. Poor sheep.”

“Well, you’ll come one day. I’ll send you pictures of the new sheep. She’s very bouncy!”

“Thank you.”

“Well, everyone, see you soon!”

“Have a good journey!”

I think I understand better now what he meant. So often, we carry the worlds in which we grew up and learn how to live deep inside us, so deeply that they become as important as a heart or a body. And so often, the most intimate part of our world is everything we are and everything we carry with us without ever saying it, almost like the desert.

In Denmark, the cold is serious. As serious as your face numbed by the Baltic wind and the frozen puddles behind the wooden stalls of a deserted Bakken.

I still don’t understand how you agreed to come here in December. It’s my birthday, and I couldn’t make it home in time. Instead, you’ve let me bring you to Dyrehaven, my favourite place in Denmark. In winter, the amusement park falls silent, leaving the forest to the deer once again.

And it’s cold.

Very cold.

The path is torn open by the snow, and the only sound that breaks the silence is your voice.

“Dani... it’s so cold.”

“Please, we have just arrived.”

“I know... but it’s so cold.”

The steady crack of branches breaking overhead marked the path as the tall red wooden gates of Dyrehaven slowly disappeared behind us. The evening was sinking into the sea. It was late, and there wasn’t another visitor in the park.

The moment we stepped through the open gates of Bakken, the quiet sounds of the forest came to an abrupt halt. Only the clatter of our winter boots against the frozen pavement had anything left to say.

In late autumn, Bakken is a lonely place.

The rides lie dormant beneath enormous green plastic covers, soaked by the rain that had fallen before dawn, and where electricity should reclaim its kingdom, stillness and absence prevail.

Two strangers are reflected in the empty shop windows of the amusement park.

“I think we’re the only visitors.”

“Don’t move.”

“But it’s normal... it’s so cold.”

Click.

“Got you.”

“Let me see... We look good, don’t you think? Although with that hat you can barely see your face. You look beautiful today.”

“Well, since we’re here, I might as well take some pictures.”

“I bet you’ve never had an amusement park all to yourself.”

“Well... I’m here with you.”

Her reflection lifted the camera towards the glass, capturing us both. Her brown eyes glistened in the cold, and her red hair glowed against the empty park.

The space between the buildings of the amusement park and our bodies grew smaller and smaller, almost desperately so. Thin, cold snowflakes scratched against the glass. It was late.

The sunken paths of autumn faded between the trees as we walked on together, slowly, as if caught in a circular current. A single sound broke the silence.

Crack!

“Dani, what was that?”

Suddenly, a deer burst through the forest, weaving between the bare, blue-tinged trees. It reached the edge of the path and stopped, completely still, watching the two human figures standing beneath the smoking roof of the world.

Click!

“Deer are beautiful.”

“I think they belong to the Queen.”

“I’ve heard that if they get too used to humans, the keepers have the right to shoot them.”

“That’s horrible.”

“That, and many other things.”

“Something is rotten in Denmark, huh?”

The deer, like so many other creatures, did not know that it lived in a northern kingdom, or that its life, like so many others, was often beyond its own control. Yet its cold gaze remained fixed upon us, meeting ours.

A moment later, the deer lowered its head and began to run, disappearing deeper into the forest until it was gone.

I remained there, staring at the absence it had left behind on the autumn path.

“Shall we go? It’s getting late. It’s so cold.”

“I thought we could walk as far as Raadvad, and from there we could go to Skodsborg station and catch the train.”

“You’re crazy, Dani.”

“Perhaps. But it’s a beautiful place.”

“All right. We’re nearly there, aren’t we?”

“Yes. We’ll be there in no time.”

Raadvad is a narrow, little village, one of the few places in Denmark that never reminded me of Denmark. It reminded me, in some strange way, of the villages back home.

It is a small settlement opening onto a clearing in the forest, with a pond where swans glide with glassy, perfect eyes. Raadvad is a village where knives were once made, and the old factory still seems to spill into the village and around the little pond.

“You know, there’s a hotel here. I wish I could live here. Don’t you? It’s so peaceful.”

“No. You’d hate it. I know you. You always want to be somewhere else. You always want to leave.”

“I know. But right now, I’d like to stay here. Here with you. Just like this.”

“I don’t know how you’re not freezing.”

“Let’s get something hot.”

The door rattled in the wind as we sat down for a hot chocolate in a café in Raadvad.

“I’ve never been this cold.”

“We both come from cold places,” I said, wrapping my hands around hers as she held the cup of hot chocolate.

“Yes, but it’s really cold today.”

Snowflakes struck the windows of the café, and our faces, as we left Raadvad behind and made our way towards Skodsborg.

The path passed quickly, almost weightlessly, carrying us towards Skodsborg station. The train appeared through the darkness, dazzling us with its headlights, and we climbed aboard.

“You’re freezing.”

“So are you.”

“How long until we get home?”

“A while. Do you want to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

“Shall we set an alarm?”

“Okay.”

“It was worth it, wasn’t it? We saw a deer.”

“Yes. That was really nice. And I took lots of pictures.”

“Hey, what if we come back in the summer?”

“Okay.”

“Come here. You can sleep on my shoulder.”

“You’re so cold, Dani.”

“Goodnight.”

“Dobranoc.”

When I woke up, the train was already empty.

Far away, snow covered the mountains of the Pyrenees. Sharp, solitary peaks began to emerge in the distance. I was returning to France, and I would have to stop once again at Canfranc station.

The mountains seemed to tear the minutes from the clock.

We never came back to Bakken.

The train slowed to a halt. I picked up my backpack and coat. Darkness pressed against the contours of the Aragonese mountains as I crossed the station concourse.

My shoulders were cold.

Very cold.

We never came back.

Two years later, another winter found me crossing the bridge towards the new church on my way back to France.

Snow held the horizon like a pillar of granite.

For a moment, I heard her voice once more.

A snowflake struck my face.

“Dani... it’s so cold.”

“Pretty lucky.”

“My lucky day?” I asked.

“Your lucky day” he repeated.

“What do you mean, lucky?”

My colleague looked up from the bar till.

“Look.”

An emerald-green praying mantis was slowly climbing the mug from which I had been drinking my instant coffee before the morning shift began. Its warm, unblinking eyes met mine beneath the pale winter sun of the Cape.

He stepped closer.

“Didn’t you know? For the San, these creatures are sacred. Apparently, if you come across one, it’s because it has chosen you. It will bring you good fortune... or perhaps not. It’s complicated. More like an omen.”

“Mmm... if you say so.”

“It’s not me saying it,” he replied. “It’s the people who were here before you arrived. Before we arrived. Perhaps even before time itself.”

“Right... I understand,” I said, gently lifting the mantis onto an empty matchbox.

“Then... where are the San now?”

He looked at me for a moment.

“Far away,” he replied. “In the desert.”

I looked at the small creature resting on the matchbox and wondered about the people whose stories were still carried by the landscape, even after they had been pushed away from it.

South Africa, a country of extraordinary complexity, carries one of the most visible contradictions of the modern world. The geography of separation did not disappear with the end of apartheid; in many ways, it changed form.

This is where the country’s estates come into view: gated residential developments of identical streets and near-identical houses, many of them designed with everything needed to live without ever leaving their boundaries. Parks, schools, gyms, small shops and even restaurants sit behind walls, surveillance cameras and electric fences, while life continues beyond the gates of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.

The barriers are no longer decreed by the state, but shaped by the property market. They appear on roadside billboards with reassuring promises: Looking for a safe place to raise your family? Plots for sale. A peaceful retirement. The promise is always the same: security.

It is difficult not to wonder how the displacement of communities initiated by the Natives Land Act of 1913 has, decades later, contributed to new forms of separation. Many of these developments are culturally and linguistically dominated by English and Afrikaans, creating spaces where contact with the country’s diversity is often limited by the walls surrounding them.

I began to notice that the geography of Cape Town was divided not only by streets and neighbourhoods, but by invisible distances.

Many of the people who worked in and around the city did not live nearby. At the end of their shifts, they waited for taxis that would take them back towards places like Khayelitsha, many kilometres away from the coastal suburbs where they spent their days working.

One evening, I mentioned that they could come inside the bar while they waited. They could have a drink, sit down for a while. We could even make some money.

The answer was no.

It was a small moment, almost insignificant. Yet it stayed with me. There were places where some people belonged, and places where they remained outside.

Yet what stayed with me most was not the separation itself, but the contradiction behind it.

I had fallen in love with South Africa: the winter light over the Cape, the endless landscapes, the humour of the people I worked with, and the conversations that continued long after the bar had closed.

Many evenings, after the last customers had left, my South African colleagues and I spoke about the country we shared. We wondered how a place of such extraordinary beauty could carry so much pain.

How could a country with such warmth, creativity and resilience continue to leave so many of its own people behind?

The question was never about the land. The land was magnificent.

The question was always about the people who belonged to it.

I came to understand that loving a country means loving more than its landscapes. It means caring about the people who wake up every morning within it, who carry its history, its contradictions and its hopes.

Perhaps that is why the contradictions hurt so much.

The more I cared about South Africa, the more difficult it became to understand how a place of such extraordinary beauty could remain divided by invisible borders.

One night in Cape Town, before switching off the light, I saw a small emerald figure twisting through the cold Atlantic air. The mantis drifted away through the bars of my window and disappeared into the night.

The mantis knew nothing of gates.

Never before had I returned home so soon. Perhaps because I had always tried to leave only shallow footprints, the kind that do not crush butterflies.

Summer was fading through the fractured corners of the river. The water carried away every sound until the voices and the echoes of the animals were erased. The wind struck the trees with the wrong shade of green; it should not have been summer. The reflection of the riverbanks stretched horizontally towards a sky that felt clean and certain.

Then I saw myself.

There, among the ochre colours of the trees, was my own reflection. Trapped between the stone and the sky, a dead and mutilated body. The river flowed on while I remained there, broken among its rapids, my skin scraped by the jagged rocks and my eyes bruised by the passing minutes. I was the quiet outline of a body that had already come to an end.

For not everything that dies leaves an empty space behind.

I was every damp footprint upon the convulsing branches of uninhabited days. I was all the silence drifting through the blue currents of summer.

The wind lifted its arms.

Never before had I returned home so soon.

To return, even when there is nothing left to return to. It is almost as impossible as describing my own body reflected in the river. Almost as impossible as the ivy that wraps itself around the exhausted walls of the village.

That is how I found myself, a decade later, standing before the final breaths of a life that had ended long before I was born. During a summer holiday back home in northern Spain.

This story has a name which, simply because it is so rarely spoken, almost seems not to exist:

Zenarbe - an abandoned village in the Aragonese Pyrenees.

To return, as I have returned for the summer; to return in order to see what others once left behind, just as one day I too will leave things behind that I shall never see again.

Something hidden inside a rain-worn stone.

The first time my heart was broken.

There, almost at dusk, wrapped in a storm of red and leaden leaves, hidden within the walls of the church - the letter I left behind.

Like many villages in the Aragonese Highlands, Zenarbe fell victim to the government’s programme of forced depopulation linked to the construction of a reservoir. Officially, the village ceased to exist on 21 November 1966.

Most of its inhabitants left for the industrial cities of Spain and France. The village itself remained behind, waiting only for its new inhabitants: snow, ivy, and the slow work of decay.

Years later, during the 1980s, much of Zenarbe was deliberately demolished with explosives. Officially, the buildings were considered dangerous and were destroyed to prevent accidents. For many former residents, however, the demolitions carried a deeper meaning. In Aragon, the house is more than a building; it is the centre of family memory and belonging. Once the houses disappeared, so too did the possibility of returning to them.

Slowly, almost methodically, Zenarbe was reduced to its roots. Today, only fragments remain: the narrow cobbled street, the cemetery beneath the cypress trees, and the church tower, still standing, watching time quietly slip away.

Weathered like an old oak, the church still watches over the valley, its tower rising above the fields while the years themselves seem to disappear into the distance.

So do I.

The letter was written a long time ago.

When I reach the village, I search for it among the stones. I twist and sink my hands into the rock, as if trying to rescue the words I abandoned there years ago.

The afternoon approaches, impregnating the contours of the mountains with its demented howl, and the letter.

The letter is not there. Only I am.

Perhaps it was beyond the door scratched by winter; perhaps the rain has already destroyed the sad, pale, and scarce fabric of my words, and most probably, nobody will ever read the letter.

The orange sun of the afternoon strikes the valley, the dead reflection of the river, the cemetery of Zenarbe, my swaying body, and the wild memory - everything I once was, everything I will be.

Every memory of myself throws itself against the years, and it is because I have grown, not horizontally, but along a thin and narrow line, yellowish and sickly at times, of fire and memory always, almost like the act of falling.

Afterwards, on the road, I will ask myself: why do we always fall?

Zenarbe is something that rises, softly levitating above the roots to reach the sad and leaden sky, in any of the seasons, and my life persists.

When I return, the rain falls once more.

On a slow autumn afternoon on the shores of the Roskilde Fjord, I was trying to escape my life for a few brief hours, even though I knew I would have to return to it before long. I immersed myself in the pale, cool colours of the Danish autumn sunset, leaving behind - if only for an afternoon - the university, my flat, my partner, and my life.

I often walked to Sankt Hans when the distant sound of buses had faded away. It was quieter then. I wandered along its paths beneath a canopy of crackling leaves in shades of red, yellow, and brown.

St. Hans is one of the largest psychiatric hospitals on the Danish island of Sjælland. Like any psychiatric hospital, the clean, pragmatic lines of its buildings unsettled me. Behind the windows, nothing could be seen - only the fading reflection of the last boats crossing the fjord towards the harbour, the steady hum of the ferry, and, in the distance, the bells of Roskilde Cathedral.

By 2023, after returning to Europe, I had walked those paths countless times.

The hospital stood among open fields and bare trees, their roots reaching towards the water’s edge, while birds skimmed low over the fjord.

There it was.

Between the sunset and the water.

Between the silence and the wind.

For a fleeting moment, with the cold Danish autumn pressing against my face, the whole kingdom of Denmark felt as though it belonged to me.

Suddenly, footsteps broke the silence of the fjord.

As I turned my gaze, I saw small figures moving through the last wisps of mist rising from the lingering rain and the orange-ochre glow of the sunset. Light footsteps crackled among the roots and branches of the forest. In the blink of an eye, they had vanished. Only faint echoes lingered in the distance, somewhere within the safety of the hospital wards.

The sound stirred a strange curiosity in me. At eight o’clock on an autumn evening in Denmark, I found myself walking towards Sankt Hans Hospital.

The door to the little chapel creaked open; someone must have forgotten to close it that afternoon. I used to spend long afternoons reading in its tower, surrounded by cobwebs and ancient machinery, fixing my gaze - my whole body, almost - on the metal shafts that supported the great bell that had never rung.

The clock, worn down by time, stared back with a bitter grimace as I looked through the windows, where a light rain had begun to fall in scattered patches. I leaned against the glass and listened once more to the footsteps moving along the hospital’s cobbled paths.

Determined to find whoever was out there, I went downstairs and crossed the chapel. There, on the neat, damp wooden benches, lay a single book: a collection of poems in Danish. I opened it at random and found a poem entitled Krystalslottet. I paused to read while the sounds scraped softly against the windows.

The poem spoke of a fragile castle standing alone on the shores of a lake.

Outside, the voices grew louder.

A sharp, almost electric sound.

I descended the final steps and stepped into the church square.

There they were.

Behind the trees, motionless, murmuring.

Small figures.

Children.

Children clutching walkie-talkies and plastic rifles, running and leaping across the damp carpet of leaves that covered the stone courtyard of Sankt Hans Hospital. They shouted to each other in a language I could not decipher, throwing themselves behind walls and tree trunks, turning the hospital into a maze of trenches and the fjord into an invisible front line. They disappeared into the woods whenever the rain grew heavier, only to emerge again a few moments later.

I watched the scene in silence.

It was late.

I had to go home.

Then two women appeared through the rain and the mist. They walked calmly towards the children, sheltering them beneath enormous umbrellas before gently leading them towards a yellow stone building, its wooden window frames covered with green moss. A single light glowed behind the windows.

The door closed softly.

As I turned the corner towards the bus stop, it was time to go home. As the bus wound its way around the bay, the crystal castle remained in the distance. Nestled among ancient, weathered leaves, St. Hans Hospital resembled the castle from the poem, fragile, isolated, almost unreal.

The gardens and triangular houses, with their perfect lines, marked the way back to my flat in Trekroner. By the time I arrived, night had settled over the concrete outlines of the university, and a single light glowed in the distance, probably the Argos power station. I found myself thinking of the yellow light at St. Hans Hospital.

That night, sleep came quickly. In my dreams, the crystal castle glowed in the distance against the darkness.

The following morning, over coffee, I told one of my classmates about the previous evening - the hospital, the rain, the children.

“Ah,” he said, almost casually. “Of course. They’re Ukrainians.”

“Ukrainians?”

“I thought most of them had gone to Poland or Germany.”

“Many did,” he replied. “But some came here, to Denmark. They’re staying at Sankt Hans.”

“Since when?”

“You weren’t here then. I think they arrived after Russia invaded Ukraine.”

“They’ve been living in the psychiatric hospital all this time?”

He nodded.

“I saw them playing war,” I said.

He was silent for a moment.

“I suppose that’s the only thing they’ve known in recent years.”

My alarm rang. It was time to go back to class.

Outside, rain drifted almost horizontally across the campus, carried by the wind. I thought of the children of St. Hans and wondered whether those same clouds, skimming the damp grass before lifting again towards the edge of the island might one day carry them home.

It was late.

Losing five or ten minutes on the way to class was inevitable. The crowded, maze-like corridors of Rikkyo University swallowed students by the hundreds, and every morning I felt like an ant disappearing into the Ishikari supercolony.

And I was late.

I drained the last sip of my vending machine coffee as a spring storm rolled across Tokyo. Class was about to begin, and for a moment my only concern was making it there on time. Then, just as I slipped my phone into my pocket, it rang. I didn’t know it then, but that call would become the first step towards a story I had never intended to find.

I glanced at the screen.

A new email.

A few lines I did not care to read at all.

Normally, I dismissed them as casually as someone tears a page from a calendar. We leave days behind without thinking twice, making room for whatever comes next. I did the same with that message, tucked my phone away, and joined the river of students flowing across the university grounds. Ikebukuro had turned red and grey beneath the spring rain, and somewhere between the station and campus I realised I couldn’t even remember the classroom number.

“Daniel.”

I turned.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” my professor said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t notice your call,” I replied, knowing perfectly well that I had.

She smiled. “It seems to be your lucky day.”

“They’ve accepted.”

“Really?”

I tried to sound composed, though my thoughts had already outrun the conversation.

“So... when?”

“Tomorrow.”

She handed me a small slip of paper with an address written neatly in Japanese and English.

“Go here. They’ll meet you outside the school. Don’t worry—you’ll recognise them.”

Then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “And since you were late, that goes on your attendance record. Now go and find a seat.”

I don’t remember much of the lecture that followed. My Korean professor spoke about aesthetics. That week we watched Chungking Express. We talked about the end of the British Empire, the rise of twenty-first-century China, old and new forms of colonialism, and the restless energy of East Asian cities. As Faye Wong’s cover of Dreams drifted through the darkened classroom, I found myself somewhere else entirely. I was no longer in Hong Kong.

They had agreed.

The images flickered across the screen, but my thoughts had already left the cinema. I imagined tomorrow before it had arrived: a school entrance in another corner of Tokyo, unfamiliar faces, perhaps a few words of Korean if necessary, and the strange realization that I was about to step into a community I had known only through books, newspaper articles, and scattered conversations.

Tomorrow, for the first time, I would meet students from Korea University. Before that moment, Chongryon had existed only as an idea. Officially, it is the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, founded in 1955 and historically associated with North Korea. That much was easy to learn from books. What interested me was everything those books couldn’t explain. To many Japanese, Chongryon is a familiar but distant presence—visible enough to be recognized, yet rarely understood. Outside Japan, it barely exists in the public imagination. But for the students I was about to meet, it wasn’t a political headline or a historical curiosity. It was simply the world they had grown up in.

That was the world I wanted to understand. Finding them had taken more than a month. I spoke with my professor, who introduced me to a South Korean film lecturer. The lecturer put me in touch with a former student from Korea University, who in turn passed my request to the community. Weeks went by with no reply. Every lead seemed to end where the next one should have begun.

Then, unexpectedly, they called. It took less than a week to arrange the meeting.

On the appointed day, I found myself standing outside the gates of Korea University. By then, my shirt was soaked through. Getting there had meant changing trains several times, crossing the western suburbs of Tokyo, and walking the final stretch beneath a quiet avenue of maple trees that led to the university’s heavy iron gates. I had arrived too early.

Impatience got the better of me. I lit a cigarette. Then another. By the fourth, I was checking my phone every few seconds.

Suddenly, the heavy wooden doors opened. Five students emerged.

They wore matching uniforms of deep Prussian blue and bright white, walking side by side with the effortless coordination that only years of shared routine can produce. I crushed my cigarette beneath my shoe as hurriedly as a teenager caught smoking by his parents. Then I looked up.

“Welcome,” they said together.

“Please, come in.”

Without another word, they led me through the doorway and into a small reception room. It was plain and almost austere. Two faded green armchairs stood opposite a simple wooden table. The room carried no particular scent, only the stillness of a place used more for conversation than decoration.

The students took their seats. I settled into the armchair opposite them. For reasons I still struggle to explain, the room felt much larger than it was.

“Would you like something to drink?” one of them asked. “It’s warm today.”

“Whatever you have is perfect. Thank you.”

Only then did I allow my eyes to wander. On the wall above them hung framed portraits of the Kim family. A few moments later, they returned with a bottle of Coca-Cola. For an instant I considered asking what they thought of serving one of the world’s most recognizable American products beneath those portraits. The question crossed my mind almost as quickly as I dismissed it. It was too clever, too obvious, and far more about my assumptions than theirs.

Instead, I accepted the glass.

“It’s very refreshing,” I said.

The truth was that I had never liked Coca-Cola. But in that moment, it became something familiar—an anchor in a room filled with people I did not yet understand. A Coca-Cola is a Coca-Cola, no matter where you are in the world. People are never quite so simple. I opened my notebook. The interview began.

The room fell quiet.

For a moment, none of us spoke. They watched me with the same curiosity that had brought me there. I had come to ask questions about their lives; perhaps they were wondering why a foreign student from Europe had travelled across Tokyo to ask them in the first place.

I began with the simplest question I could think of.

“What do you want to do after university?”

One of the young men answered first.

“I know it’s difficult to work in North Korea,” he said. “But I’m studying business administration and commerce. I’d like to help bring China and North Korea closer together. There are opportunities along the border. I think that’s where the future is.”

“How?” I asked.

He smiled.

“I don’t know yet. But someone has to try.”

A young woman spoke next.

“It isn’t so important what people think we are,” she said. “What’s important is what we’re able to become.”

Another nodded.

“There have been problems with some political groups in Japan,” she admitted. “But my family is here. My friends are here. Why would I leave just so someone could say, ‘Oh, you’re from Japan’?”

The conversation drifted naturally between politics and ordinary life.

When I asked what the future held for their community, one student answered seriously.

“We want to make our families and our teachers proud.”

He paused.

“As for the next few years...”

The others smiled.

“...first I’d like to pass next week’s exam.”

The room burst into laughter.

I asked one final question.

“If you could say one thing to Japanese students, what would it be?”

There was a brief silence.

One student answered quietly.

“Our grandparents came here a long time ago. We’re part of this island too.”

Another spoke.

“I’ve never even been to Korea. Being Japanese is the only life I’ve ever known.”

Then a third looked around the room before saying, simply,

“We’re the same.”

When the interview ended, a snow-white veil of spring pollen hung in the air as I said goodbye to the students at the gates of Korea University. As I walked away, they stood waving from a distance, their arms raised against the afternoon sky. From afar, their figures slowly dissolved into the sunlight as I turned the corner towards Takanodai Station.

Later, on the train back to Ikebukuro, I found myself thinking about them—their immaculate uniforms, their quiet composure, their young, calm eyes, and the words they had entrusted to me. How was I ever going to explain all of this? Would my Japanese classmates understand? Would they simply shrug and move on? Did it even matter who they were? Who would they become? Who are we, after all?

As the train carried me back through Tokyo, I thought again of those figures beneath the heavy spring sun. Outside, the electric lights climbed the walls of Shibuya as evening slowly settled over the city. I made my way home with a notebook full of words and the eyes of those Chongryon students—filled with hope, uncertainty, and the future itself—etched into my own.