A friend came from the other side of town — though it’s just a half-hour by subway, it feels like another country. We walk through my neighborhood, which I think I know like the back of my hand. Suddenly, he stops in front of a store with a red sign, and I freeze too. Not that I haven’t seen it before — my eyes just slid past without stopping. I’ve walked here for twelve years, but this part of the street isn’t in my memory. Through the shop window, a strange light leaks out, and it feels awkward. Is this still my neighborhood or someone else’s now?

A map pops up in my head like a route tape: home, the crossroads, left turn by the pharmacy, the café with the green couch. Everything else — a blank spot.

The weirdest thing isn’t even that a neighbor lives nearby. His city barely crosses with mine, even if we’re on the same floor. He takes a different road in the morning, greets other dogs in the yard, and knows a different doorman. Turns out, inside one Milan, hundreds of different cities live — their paths layered over each other but hardly ever matching.

Turn a corner or walk a bit further than usual — and everything changes. Faces and smells crowd in, the air feels thicker like a different climate. The blank spots press right up to the apartment door.

It’s absurd: I’ve lived here so many years and know nothing about 90% of the streets around me. You can live your whole life in a city and never step into the yard across the street — just because it’s off your usual path. A tourist comes, looks at your buildings with fresh eyes, and sees facades that seem invisible to you.

When does it start to feel like you can “know the city” at all? The truth is, everyone has just their own squeeze from the city mass: a chain of steps between point A and B, a collection of random meetings on the way, a daily sequence of fleeting gestures and glances.

Everything else stays a blank canvas between the patterns of habit.

On paper, the avenues are straight lines, the blocks neat grids under Google Maps’ shine… but no one ever walks like that.

Every route is a private ritual.

Michel de Certeau called this the “city from below.” Instead of one plan — thousands of individual paths that never fully fit into each other.

The paradox grabs you by the collar: when you move away, you don’t lose the whole city (it stands still just fine). You lose your version of that city: the exact road past a familiar window in the morning; the empty bench at the stop where you smoke a cigarette; that very alley where you know every pothole by foot, even at night.

The feeling of loss hits suddenly.
You miss your map that dissolved along with your registered address.

The city stays drawn from above as it was… but your map disappears completely.

You can’t catch that moment of vanishing — it slips away like a dream after waking.
Like memory itself erases the edges of your own city version: you can’t get back that road to work or the small ritual of buying coffee at that exact kiosk.

Sometimes I catch myself wanting to go back just to those details, not the whole city at once.

And then the question sinks deeper: can you really lose a city if each of us only ever loses our own route?

I don’t know.
But sometimes an empty map inside feels heavier than a new strange home all around.