Venezia

Venezia. The city that inspires art of all persuasions, a city that is art in and of itself. Romantic, stoic, stately, dying slowly and gracefully, returning to the water and the mystery from which it emerged.

Gondoliers guide their elaborate boats down lapping canals, their voices echoing off of lacy facades.

The aromas of her back alleys, the steady buzz of visitors from around the planet giving her a heartbeat, the water smoothly flowing in place of her stradas giving life to her sanguine presence.

Unabashed grandeur. Ridiculous wealth drips from her every piazza, unashamed.

Her voice beacons, whispers that if only you turn the next corner, wander the next alley, she'll reveal another secret.

You get a faint glimpse, a hint of her inner beauty, then it steals you down the next backstreet, lures you deeper into her dark crevices where you beg to be lost.

Quickly, you fall for her. You yearn to caress her beauty with with hoping eyes, and a curious heart.

Her beguiling charms make you heartsick knowing you have to leave.

She doesn't care how passionately you love her, how quickly you've submitted to her wiles. She shrugs you off like a schoolyard crush, ignores your pleas to converse with her. She flexes her mighty scenes, languishes in the aria, tears your soul asunder, a million times.

The smell of her, the taste of her, the flavor of water, land, labor, love, pain, air, and burning, fiery passion. Her ambiance evades your pleading all the while tempting you with more, more.

The water continues to lap softly under the din of modernity, telling you she will never change. In your heart, in her own eternal soul, she is unique. She has captured an essence of beautiful humanity that is hers alone, and she guards it until her last, sepulchre breath.

Her sweet, saccharine memory.

The way she makes that which was born of poverty, of desperation, grand, lends her own unique version of splendor that can never be replicated. She glitters with glass, reverberates with art, sparkles with all the spectacular wealth of the world, both new and old.

The way she makes you feel small, like nothing you could ever do could impress her, could compare to the worlds she's witnessed.

You watch her fade in the distance, see the people arriving anew into her bosom, and you feel a twinge of jealousy at them. How could they ever love her the same way you do? How dare they attempt a look around her velvet curtains, to catch a glimpse of her unclothed beauty. Can they ever feel her true heart, will they get to see more, will they perchance know her? Can anyone?

Leaving, being away from her, she haunts you, haunts our collective memory. Nothing like her has ever been, and after her it never shall be. She is disarmingly beautiful, absurdly stubborn, and irreparably etched into your mind. It hurts, and she revels in the pain she inflicts, she knows what she is to the world, she knows who she is.

And yet, no one else ever will.

Bellisimo.