🏷️ العلامة: North Carolina

Just off the Neuse River Greenway, beside Horseshoe Farm Park in Wake Forest, NC, there’s a slope—recently draped in straw matting, its surface stitched by the long shadows of overhead wires. A scene meant for erosion control, not contemplation. And yet… it feels like something else entirely.

Like the courtyard of a forgotten palace. A waiting place. A world paused.

It reminded me of Ico, that quiet, luminous game where light leaks through broken stone and time feels suspended. Its visual mood seems born from Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical plazas—empty, endless, hushed—and from Tropic of Cancer (1945) by Ramsès Younan, whose painted stillness carries the same breathless tension.

Fumito Ueda, the game’s director, once said he aimed to build a world “forgotten by time.” You can feel it, in the architecture. In the air.

And maybe that’s what this image is too: just a roadside scene. Or maybe, the opening frame of a dream you almost remember.

G. de Chirico, Arrivo del trasloco, circa 1965. Source: Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico

Here in the Southeast (U.S., that is), the talk of the town has recently revolved around the most mundane of topics: the unseasonably cold weather and inflated gas prices caused by an apparent cyber attack on the Colonial Pipeline. On Blackwell Street in Durham, there were so many cars in the parking lot of a gas station that it appeared impossible for all but the outermost cars to drive out—a canonically tangled jam.

I have been reflecting on the cool sound of that one consonant that seems only to occur in Portuguese, the one that appears in the name João.