'Arrival' is a Misnoma

'Arrival' is a misnoma. You may be in a new place but you aren’t there yet, you aren’t in it, you make no impact. As I arrived in Venice on a near-Summer’s afternoon on 1 June 2015, I felt the impetus of relief: so many weeks, no, months, to get here. But to where exactly? Walking streets, over the first two days, I think of entrances as points of arrival we hope to encounter. In Venice, they lie in paths, along the run of the ochre, yellow and pink crumble and peel of walls, they are secreted behind gates, they are cut off by water, they are linked and dropped by bridges. They have their own life, their own language paced out as poetic runes. Venice the island, the historic water city, entices the act of arrival--calle, vie, corte, campo, fondamenta, piazza. We walk, my husband and I, where we want to escape the crush for prescribed views and momentoes. If I stripped out all these bodies, would I be able to engage any more than this? So much grandeur, so little time. I wander more quietly with the phone as a camera because that’s all I have. I try to feel the invisible city. What is this way in which such cities draw us in, and push us away?