It is not easy to find Saphira, and it is even harder to leave. If it so chooses, the city will appear first as a quivering mirage on the horizon, second as a blinding stone mirror, and third as a sprawling maze whose sounds and sensations embrace the traveler in a slow and languid frenzy. Quite famously, it is home to countless locked eyes and spellbound hearts. It is a place whose deep currents of longing, like the sound of its ocean shore, seem to rumble and hiss under the surface of every word and gesture, in every bead of sweat that blooms from the glimmering skin of its people.

Saphira is at all times caught between a low-lying sun to the west and a glowing moon to the east. They hang above the skyline with an eerie stillness, watching the city’s tireless creatures writhe together in tenderness and sin, casting upon them a pale, silvery gold light that hangs heavy in the humid air. It is in the tension of this peculiar light and its slender, tangled shadows that Saphira’s longing grows dense and time thickens within its walls. Traveler and resident alike are suspended in an endless eros, caught tightly between pain and pleasure, between the sting of saltwater in one’s eyes and the sticky sweetness of ripe fruit on one’s lips. 

Perhaps this is why Saphira’s radios and televisions stutter with phrases and images so ghostly yet so intimately familiar, why its dusty buildings seem always to crumble so gloriously yet never collapse, why around every corner there is a street that so closely resembles one of a distant and loving memory, and why the curling flakes of paint on its walls and facades will reach out against the heat without fading or falling. It is a city inside of want and outside of time.

Text by Devon Hansen, Photo by CCL

Invisible Cities Ⅰ: 𝓼𝓪𝓹𝓱𝓲𝓻𝓪

@subglow / liquidtime. 
CCL(they/them) liquefaction of rhythmic and melodic matter—combustive phase transitions through wiggle-steppers, trip-no, dub-core, cowgirl-breaks, trip funk, shoe-gays, drum & face.

liquidtime / subglow 
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