In Belgium, Mea bought a postcard with an ambitious plan: this time she would write something better than “it's beautiful here.” She had a pencil. A stamp, too. All she lacked was the simplest thing of all — what she actually wanted to say.
An imagined solo journey with Mea Zen, inspired by original Travel2City photographs. Bruges, Brussels, Leuven and the Belgian coast form a collage of separate stops. Events and dialogue are fictional; this is not a one-day itinerary.
In the square, she looked up at the gables. One red, another pale, each with its own opinion on how a roof should end. “Picturesque,” Mea tried. Then “enchanting.” Both words felt borrowed from somebody else's brochure. She rested her pencil against the postcard's corner and watched the people beneath the awnings. She could describe five façades, three colours and a cloud. But the other side of the card already had a picture. “All right,” she told herself. “The houses can introduce themselves.” She put the card away without a sentence.
In the Brussels arcade, she finally had an idea. One hand held the postcard, the other chocolate, while the pencil tried to belong to both. “I'll write something about the light,” she decided, looking up at the glass roof. By the time she unwrapped the last piece, a tiny brown smudge had appeared on the paper's corner. Mea looked at it. She tried to wipe it off, promoting it to a fully fledged part of the composition. Then she smiled and put the napkin away. “At least one thing on this postcard is accurate now.”
In Leuven, she found a lane where nothing asked her to hurry. She laid the postcard on her closed notebook and paused beside a window. “Today I saw…” she wrote, then stopped. For a moment she imagined someone dear standing at her shoulder, leaning over the paper and quietly laughing at the chocolate. She knew at once what she would show them: the shadow beneath the arch, the uneven cobbles, the little window at the end of the lane. Not everything. Just this. She gently crossed out her opening. Suddenly the pencil didn't have to work so hard.
On the coast, the wind tousled her hair before she could find her pencil. The sea slowly approached the footprints in the sand, then changed its mind each time. Mea finished one short sentence. She read it again, this time without correcting it. There was room on the postcard for the smudge, her name and a little kiss. She held the paper against her chest so the wind wouldn't take it and looked out at the water. She no longer had to squeeze the houses, the arcade and the lane into five lines. That sentence opened a door to all of them.
“I wish I could show you this.”
From notebook to book
The Map with No Last Page
The world of Travel2City continues between the covers of a book. Discover The Map with No Last Page and more illustrated journeys.
