Terminal City

At first it is only timing. Crows gathering before dawn. Rails appearing in rain where no tracks remain. A song heard beneath a train returning later through an open window. People entering a room that seemed empty a minute before.

Stay out long enough and the coincidences begin to lean toward one another. Something appears to be moving through Vancouver: through the wires, the walls, the water, the trains, the people making things after everyone else has gone home.

Nothing announces itself. Nothing explains what it is doing. But every so often, from the right street, at the right hour, the machinery becomes visible for a moment. And after enough of those moments, a different possibility begins to form: whatever is moving through the city is not haunting it. It is tending it.

Keeping music moving. Keeping walls alive. Keeping rooms open. Keeping strange ideas in circulation. Keeping something essential from going quiet.

No photograph proves it. But once glimpsed, the city does not quite return to being ordinary.

THE CITY MUST NOT FALL SILENT.