A chance accident changed the way I move through the city. I slipped on ice, split my eyebrow, and ended up in the hospital; the doctors said I was lucky — at a slightly different angle the fall could have ended far worse.

After being discharged, every walk became a state of alertness. I slowed down and kept my eyes on the ground. Space stopped being a surface I simply passed over and turned into a physical force — something that decided, step by step, whether I stayed upright or fell. For the first time the environment felt autonomous: indifferent to me, with its own rules, while I was only a body moving through it, exposed.

Before, I moved automatically, absorbed in an endless stream of thoughts, paying no attention to what I walked across. Now my gaze was pinned to the ground, and at the center was no longer me, but the surface underfoot.