Not A Tourist

Nobody stops here. The lamp, the shutters, the worn stone that everyone else photographs - none of it registers when you've walked past it four thousand times. There's a shop still open at the end of the alley and something to pick up before it closes.

The street was here first and will outlast the errand. It has held this light every evening for centuries, indifferent to whether anyone notices. Someone is moving through it too fast to be caught properly, on their way to something ordinary.

That's what makes a place real. Not the people who come to look at it, but the ones who use it and keep going.