The first time I walked down this alley, my footsteps seemed unusually loud. It wasn't because there were no people, but rather the street itself seemed to be quietly listening. The old wooden building exteriors, the tangled wires, the red brick chimneys jutting out over the walls—these are not decorations, but traces of time. Someone's winter must have escaped through that chimney, and someone's morning must have dawned beyond those wires.
The fact that an alley is old doesn't simply mean the buildings are aged. An old street has layers. Beneath the newly painted surfaces, the previous colors show through, and rust blooms like flowers on the metal railings. As you read each of these layers, you can faintly sense how many daily lives this space has embraced. It's something too humble to call history, yet too weighty to dismiss as mere scenery.
In this alley where chimneys and wires intersect, time is layered both vertically and horizontally.
I walked again in the late afternoon. When the angle of light changes, the same street takes on a different expression. The grain of the wooden buildings becomes more distinct in the shadows, and the wires cast thin lines on the alley floor. It feels as though the street rewrites itself with each time of day. The morning alley and the evening alley are the same place, but they leave entirely different memories.
Walking through such streets makes me reconsider the word preservation. Erasing something because it's inconvenient or old might make things more convenient, but behind that convenience, something always disappears. Spaces like attics, with unclear uses, or alleys, which are far from efficient, allow us to sense time because they remain. Memories adhere better to surfaces that are a bit tilted and a bit worn, rather than to straight walls.
I paused briefly at the end of the street. There was no special reason. I simply wanted to look a little longer. I can't know all that this alley remembers, but I felt I could sense the weight of those memories through the soles of my feet. Perhaps this is where affection begins—not from anything flashy or explained, but from the simple fact of having been together for a long time.
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