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How does one begin to write about a city? Like this, I thought:

Loops of brown hair floated on the shower floor. Through cold white tile, I could hear the ribcage-pounding music of the raucous Australians in the next room. I had turned down their invitation to stumble drunkenly from one pub to another, and I knew they thought me boring for that, but when I stepped over the backpacks leaning against one another in the corridor, down the wooden stairs slick with spilled drinks and out into Riga with my eyes on a cobalt blue sky, I was exploding with contained happiness. I was hungry. The lights were coming on in Vecriga, the old town, glowing around pastel rooftops and spires in a way that made me aware I was making memories.

Or this:

Near the Lithuanian border I had indulged in flavored water, giving away most of my litas, and felt a new crowd of strange coins in my palm. Until the bus wove into Riga, gentle fields and cottages with flowerpots had fled past my window, the glass misty with strangers’ fingerprints.

I remembered those things from only a few hours ago, but they seemed irredeemably gone as I walked down a lane in old Riga—Vecriga—by tables where couples sipped wine and glanced at me with smiles left from the end of laughter. Waitresses dashed about, some looking invitingly at me, but I ate alone in a café whose name was painted in an arc across the window. I read it from the inside several times—every time I looked up from my pancakes with jam—but I have forgotten it since.

Still the city eludes description, withdraws. I pour the essence of it into the sieve of these words, and I wait. I wait and—

—the goneness of it alights on my shoulders.

Let me tell you more.

There were three Korean girls in the dorm when I returned that night. One of them approached me hesitantly as I was making my bed, and asked me something about a bus, or a market. I remember unfolding my already creased map, tracing streets with my finger, and her braces showing as she giggled. I went to sleep in the half-light of a northern summer, with an alarm clock on the floor beside me, thrilled that I would wake up so far from home.

And it was far, I knew the next day when I went up a church steeple in an elevator with three others and a guide who gave a speech in Latvian and smiled apologetically at me. At the top the wind whipped my hair and rooftops glared in the sun. Vecriga uncurled in angular lanes. I watched people who did not know they were being watched.

They do not know they are in this story. But they are only details, and this is not a story.

A story might go like this:

“Fuck you,” he yelled, looking at me, leaning out of the car as it turned a corner and vanished. The city had been unremarkable until then. I had hopped off a bus, wandered through a closing market to see boxes of rotten strawberries heaped by the stalls, and eaten dumplings. I had crossed wide streets, struggling with a map flapping in the wind from passing cars, and said no to a nun, brown-skinned like me, who had asked if I needed help.

Then the car, and the guy saying, “Fuck you.”

I kept walking in confusion, startled to hear English, not trusting my ears. I kept walking and when the sun began to streak the sky pink and orange, I stopped and turned back.

But I do not want to write that story. It is not important enough.

What is important is the street, the sloping roofs and shops torn by tram wires. It is important that heavy women and slim men sold tomatoes and DVDs across the canal from the bus station, and that I went to a museum and slowly saw the clothes of dead people, names sewn in thread by mothers and lovers forever separated, because entry was free.

I waited for trains, once at the wrong platform, waited in line at the post office, waited to pay at grocery stores and for night to settle over the Daugava, for the river to glisten like a snake’s back.

I wait, again, to open a city that folds when approached by words. Riga is made of waiting. Tell me if it bores you.