"I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance." — Arthur Rimbaud
Nearly twenty years ago, before algorithms and the smog of modern distraction, I lived in Hanoi. I was young. I had no phone, only a small notepad, a few blunt pencils, and a tattered copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations that smelled faintly of sandalwood and mildew. I would walk through the Old Quarter in the early haze of morning, when the steam of street broth curled into the air like ghosts, and the shopfronts creaked open like old books. Hanoi was not loud then, not to me. It was a city of whispers and incense, of shifting light and narrow alleyways where time seemed reluctant to pass.
There was a small tea shop I returned to again and again. Just a fan spinning overhead, cracked jade tiles, and low wooden stools carved smooth by decades of elbows and stories. No decoration save a single sprig of marigold in a chipped vase and a hand brushed character on the wall meaning, I was told, “breathe.”
I remember the interiors most of all. Their restraint. The kind of beauty that hums quietly beneath the surface. Bare walls. Woven mats. A single lantern. A rice bowl placed just so. That way of arranging a space like one arranges a poem. Each object chosen, nothing wasted. The Vietnamese way of seeing, of dwelling, taught me to notice things I had overlooked. The shadow of a bamboo blind as it moved across the wall. The call of a street vendor echoing down an alley like a lullaby.
At night, I would sit at the window of my room, the fan clicking, listening to motorbikes in the distance and reading Rimbaud aloud like a prayer. Hanoi made his strange music make sense. “I invented the colours of the vowels,” he wrote. And I could see it, red clay, indigo roofs, amber lanterns bobbing in the mist like stars underwater.
Then there was Mai Chau.
I rode my little Honda out into the hills, no map, no plan. Just a notebook in my backpack and the pages of Rimbaud tucked into my jacket like a secret. The city unravelled behind me, replaced by green that grew greener, by hills that folded into one another like sleeping dragons. The road wound its way through tiny villages and sudden clearings, water buffalo in the fields, children waving with both hands. And then I arrived. A valley of rice fields and stilt houses and girls on bicycles with white hats and quiet eyes.
I stayed with a family who spoke no English, and I spoke only a little Vietnamese. Still, we spoke. With smiles, with gestures, with the shared rhythm of preparing food and watching the wind in the trees. The air was thicker there. Sacred, almost. The kind of silence you hear in temples or forests, the kind that makes your heart beat slower.
I fell in love with the countryside. Not just the place, but the pace. The soft rain on tin roofs. The flicker of fireflies. The way the mist rose each morning like a curtain being drawn open by invisible hands. I wrote every day. Not for anyone, just for the page. I think, looking back, I was writing myself into existence. Letting the stillness teach me how to be still.
"Life is ephemeral, like a morning dew or a flash of lightning." — Studio Ghibli, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
There was magic in those months, not loud, not cinematic. Just the soft magic of rhythm and ritual and the haunting clarity of solitude. Hanoi taught me to observe. Mai Chau taught me to belong to a place without possessing it. Rimbaud taught me that language can be lightning. Ghibli later reminded me that sometimes the truest things are those that vanish.
Even now, when life is fast and full of screens, I go back in my mind to that narrow tea shop, to the rice fields glowing under moonlight, to the feeling of being utterly foreign and entirely at home.
And sometimes, in the quiet moments, I still dance across the ropes I once stretched from star to star.
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