Every city has a street people stop seeing.
Visitors notice it immediately.
They look up at the buildings. They read signs. They stop without warning in the middle of the pavement and cause small traffic accidents involving irritated locals and takeaway coffee.
Locals simply walk.
I find this fascinating.
Familiarity is supposed to make us understand things better. Often, it does the opposite.
The first time we enter a room, we notice everything.
The light.
The furniture.
The strange painting someone has decided deserves an entire wall.
Return often enough and the room begins to disappear.
Cities work the same way.
A person can walk the same street for twenty years and eventually remember almost nothing about it.
Not because nothing happened there.
Because too much did.
The street becomes part of the machinery of life. The route to work. The way home. The place between the station and somewhere more important.
We stop looking at places once we believe we know them.
Writers have the same problem with characters.
The moment I decide I understand someone, I become less curious about them.
He is the quiet one.
She is the difficult one.
He makes jokes when things become uncomfortable.
Useful descriptions.
Dangerous conclusions.
People are rarely as consistent as the stories we tell about them.
The quiet person speaks when nobody expects it.
The difficult person is unexpectedly kind to someone who cannot offer them anything.
The man who jokes through every uncomfortable moment encounters one subject he does not find funny.
Suddenly, the street looks different.
Nothing has changed.
Except the person looking at it.
I sometimes wonder how many stories disappear because we become familiar with them too quickly.
We decide what a place is.
We decide who a person is.
Then we continue walking.
Perhaps this is why I like arriving in cities where I know nobody.
For a few days, everything is visible.
A laundrette at midnight can seem important.
A man reading alone in a crowded bar becomes a question.
A closed door is still allowed to be a closed door without immediately becoming a metaphor.
Then familiarity arrives.
It always does.
The strange street becomes the usual route.
The café becomes my café.
The person behind the counter no longer needs to ask what I want.
This is comforting.
It is also the moment I have to remind myself to look again.
Not harder.
Just again.
There is a difference.
The best stories are not always hiding in places we have never been.
Sometimes they are standing on the street we walk every day.
Waiting for us to finally look up.
— D. Vaen