An older friend of many years told me that my piece on biking reminded him of some white man's book about walking the city. He couldn't remember the name of the author or the book. And then misremembered it as Khushwant Singh's beautifully illustrated (with watercolors by Suddhasattwa Basu) book on the seasons in this city. I went looking for it and bought 4 books, testifying something about this city that I have felt since childhood, years before I ever got to live here.

Turned out Sam Miller's was the book he was trying to recall. And Sam Miller took me to Thom Dunn's poems... apparently Dunn's early poems became known for his 'unembarrassed portrayal' of the interpersonal conflict of human romantic attraction. I am moved by this review, this rare acknowledgement of the war between people when they start to want the other but are unwilling to admit it, denying the power the other has, wanting to challenge and tease it, wanting to hurt the other in vehement refusal of the vulnerability to being hurt oneself. Till they start themselves to ache when the other hurts, and the line vanishes between hurting as a verb and hurting as an emotion... 

I seem to have lived this journey with two people in this life so far. 

I believe both of them were part of the pull that I felt for this city; both belonged to this place and were here in the years when it started to tug at me especially strongly. The first I met almost immediately after starting to study here, and he introduced me, virtually, to the work of the second and to his existence. I met the latter 12 years after that and am still, for the last 8 years or so, negotiating that interpersonal conflict with him.