The ritual. Plastic stool, metal filter, drip by drip — and nowhere to be.
I went to Da Nang at the end of February. I came back at the end of March. I'm still not entirely sure I came back all the way.
The trip wasn't planned far in advance. I'd been tired in the particular way you get tired when you've been in the same rooms for too long — tired of your own habits, your own routes, the same light through the same window. A friend said: come. I said: when? She said: now. So I did.
I landed in the middle of the afternoon. The heat was the first thing — not uncomfortable, just present, a kind of warmth that doesn't ask permission. By the time I got to the sea I'd already decided I wasn't ready to leave.
Something about the street stalls made me want to slow down completely. I bought fruit I didn't know the name of.
The city and the sea.
Da Nang is two places at once, and that's part of what got under my skin. There's the seafront — long and wide and golden, the kind of beach that makes you feel like you are slightly inside a painting. Everything is vivid there. The colours of the boats. The smell of grilled fish from the stalls along the road. The way the light hits the water at about 5pm, when it goes low and orange and the sea turns to hammered copper.
And then there's the city side — tighter, busier, louder — motorcycles weaving through intersections, markets stacked high with things you don't have names for, narrow streets that open suddenly into wide squares. The city side moves at a completely different frequency. You can feel the energy of it before you see it. It's alive in a way that woke something up in me too.
The first two weeks I was a tourist in the best sense. I walked everywhere. I ate everything. I said yes to every suggestion. I took photographs with my phone and immediately forgot about them because the real thing was always better than any picture I could take of it.
Then time started to move differently.
Coffee in Da Nang hits differently. I've decided that's a medical fact and I'm sticking to it.
I can't tell you exactly when it happened. There was no clear moment. But somewhere in the third week, I started to notice that the city felt like it was timelapsing around me while I was standing still inside it.
The traffic would rush past — faster, it seemed, than before. The markets filled and emptied. People moved through the streets the way clouds move in a time-lapse film: purposefully, at speed, in every direction. And I was in the middle of it, but not of it. Walking slowly. Looking at things. Feeling like I was living slightly outside the seconds instead of inside them.
"It wasn't dissociation. It was more like expansion. Like each step took longer than it should have — not in an anxious way, but in the way that a song takes longer than its running time, because you're actually inside it."
I'd walk along the seafront in the early evening and feel like my feet were touching the ground too carefully, the way you walk when you know a place is ending and you're trying to make it last. Every step deliberate. Every breath noticed. The sound of the waves very precisely present — not background, not atmosphere, but the actual subject.
I started writing in my notebook at a café I went to every day, a small place a few blocks from the water that had bad coffee and a good fan and two cats. I wrote down the phrase: no waves crashing on my skin. I didn't know what it meant yet. I knew it was the first line of something.
How the song started coming out.
The melody came on a scooter, of all places. I was on the back of my friend's scooter heading to the market one morning, and I had my headphones in — not playing anything, just wearing them the way you sometimes do when you want to be slightly inside your own head — and this melodic phrase just arrived. I hummed it once. Then again. Then I pulled out one earbud and sang it louder so I wouldn't lose it, which my friend found extremely funny.
It was the verse melody, and it was almost complete from the start. That almost never happens to me. Usually the melody and the words wrestle with each other for weeks. This one felt like it had been waiting around somewhere already.
The one afternoon I traded the coffee for a coconut. The beach made it feel reasonable.
The words came in pieces — a phrase here, a line there, scrawled in my notebook at the café with the bad coffee. Not in one sitting. More like the song was sending me things in small batches, one at a time, and trusting me to collect them. The hardest part has been finding the structure that holds the feeling without explaining it. Because the feeling I'm trying to capture — that sense of floating gently outside the seconds, of being fully present in a place while simultaneously slightly outside it — doesn't move in a straight line. It doesn't build to a clear resolution. And songs, for better or worse, usually do.
I'm still in production on it. I've recorded the verse twice and scrapped both versions — not because they were wrong, exactly, but because they were trying too hard to sound like the feeling instead of just being it. I think I need to let it be quieter than I've been letting it be.
If you've listened to the song already — thank you. If you haven't, it's here. I hope it finds you in a moment that still sounds like somewhere else. ♡
