Gypsy Lanes

A travel piece.

It Started With A Beer and Ended With Butterfly Wings

It began with a goofy attempt at beer chugging. With fluorescent-rose lips and smoky eyes ready to slay a Friday night, at an artsy café fashioned in surrealist decor and smothered in creepers, scented with whiffs of sugary tangerines and goat cheese bagels, snoozled away in some forgotten corner of the ubiquitous city sprawl. The evening’s offerings promised levity: thyme, sumac, and sesame seeds, a perfect marriage of condiments in a Lebanese Man'oushe, followed by a duet of a petite, saucy cupcake winking at a dishy pastry. We giggled, words jiggling ten a second over tall whiskeys. Hopping between "ITS" of the moment, but somehow, it morphed into a night restive.

On an impulse,

I claimed the window seat—where life hung slack, suspended in the half-and-half of night. Not knowing where the ball would land on a Roulette wheel, I accepted its dare. Then—as if curtain whelked mid performance—I awoke to snow-capped peaks, to water gargling in crystalline glee. Wildflowers in riotous hues: carol red, terracotta, salmon pink—some disciplined, others feral, each one a psalm to nature’s unabashed candor. A treehouse leaned against the lush swell of spectrum green, ringed by many-moons-old trees whispering anecdotes of centuries. Rice paddies snaked down the hillsides like bewitching bracelets, an emerald cursive scribed by earth itself. Flora and fauna staged a surreal pageant: darting silver fish, roughhousing monkeys, horsing orangutans, camels with eyes heavy as dusk.

At the railing, a yellow-spotted butterfly flitted about. Birdsong threaded itself cheekily through the maze. A snowflake clung to the pane beside a single drop of rain. Dandelion darlings sifted through my fingers. Somewhere, faintly, Buddha Bar pulsed—like a muffled live wire. Sunlight sieved through pinpricks in the leaves; a banquet of radiance I snacked upon. My hands curled around syrupy-sweet Turkish coffee, a stuffed flatbread steaming at its side, tasting of both mountain air and city smoke.

The sun played its playful masquerade of peek-a-boo, ready to deal a different hand, birthing the gift of a new day. My mind began to direct its gallery: every window a frame, every frame a kaleidoscope. Gypsy lanes fleshed out like ribbons. A marketplace tipping over itself into frenzy, hawkers hawking curiosities, trading ends for odds. A nightingale’s droppings—sold, curiously, for an arm and a leg. Puppets jittered in half life, local art was fetching, and Snake charmers no longer caricatures, traversed in a tongue only privy to them both.

I caught a coup d'oeil: a couple zigging tenderly at their 60th anniversary. Bubbles coughed by a pipe, drifted like fugitive wishes. Pennies tossed into a wishing well. A face crazed with freckles that burned into constellations. A geranium-pink call box, lonely yet resolute, stood on a deserted street. Old familiars reappeared, clothed as new. A private showing of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof melted into A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams collided with Rushdie in a dusty skip shop—desire folding into satire, tragedy into laughter.

Colors whistled themselves into notes. Lilac landscapes rose on bird backs broke open, neon sings warped and wafted, scattering their invitations. A bonfire rose to heaven on a November night. A nickel, brash and glitzy, coruscated · in a puddle. Seekers wandered past, vagabonds, movers, and shakers in their wake.

Then—the stray, a mutt wobbling for his life. I thieved him home and christened him as Newspaper, for he adored curling into yesterday’s headlines. Beneath a sky sequined with lit rocks, Pearl Jam’s Nothing Man fed into my ears—the lament of lovers: one gone, the other still waiting. He curled into my lap, bundled as though he had always belonged. I knew he understood. I was but a sojourner, yet for that moment, I was his den mother. A goodbye quaked at the edges of night, like a leaf floating on water's skin.


And somewhere—between mountain breath and butterfly wing—I found peace.

Here, where wildflowers riot ungoverned, the city can put its lust on pause.

Every day, I thought, is its own cinema reel, a manuscript inscrolling, a novel whispering to be written.