It looked as if it smelt like moist moss Ash Lemon grass Myrrh? Slightly unpleasant and, interchangeably, so very sweet Came in waves of gentler and stronger gusts of Eucalyptus Lemon Verbena? Incense Sticks? Church on the Feast of Corpus Christi day? I didn’t expect to find myself in that photograph. Warsaw is calm and subdued on a winter morning I arrive on one of those trains that fill me with hope as a modern-generation Pole. Warszawa Centralna Train Station - monolith and unforgiving to idiots-architects steadily surrounding it by the newly-rich landscape of ill-wishing skyscrapers - leaves no space for subtle introductions to visitors. After walking by a collection of its objects “to fondle with”, courtesy of the so-called patelnia (eng. a frying pan), frantically exhibited at its mouth, I am in. It’s been too long. I can feel it now. No other city in the world is capable of abusing and pleasing my senses in equal measures. I feel a woman here and cannot wait to be swallowed by this city filled with mismatching town houses exuding dignity and grandeur not known to cities untouched by war. I did not expect though that Warsaw, only known to my younger self from day trips in my Sunday best, as our capital, will have smelt to me of a beautiful loss by the late hours of the afternoon. “I’m coming over in February”, I wrote. Long-overdue fonts unhurriedly rustled their digital leaves among the swaying hills of my keyboard. “Let me know where and when.” Some weeks earlier I asked for a photograph. A token. As I move up and down across the meandering organism that the deliciously sombre central Warsaw is, curiously odd regrets start filling her tube-akin interconnected passages. And so under the Palace of Culture and Science’s sabotaged clock eye pulsing out my fleeting visit, a risqué notion starts slowly surfacing. Could this unlikely trip free me? After crossing the hailed, principal city throughway of Aleje Jerozolimskie and experiencing consuming passion of city workers to get home for open-style sandwiches, later that day, a skilfully hidden Warsaw’s predecessor of street food, easily meeting its daily quotas, beckons me to explore the brave New World (pl. Nowy Swiat). And as starking rose-jam doughnut reactants come to play, I find my visit start to yield reactions. And so I ionize. As there he is - holding that damned picture under his arm. There is no gentleness in the exchange that follows, set amidst a small confined space behind a theatre bar curtain, chosen after a short walk across what could only be described as a city of awakening energy. Chosen as if to place me in direct proximity of work he automatically invites me to judge… I feel betrayed; by the city from my childhood memories filled with innocent displays of Barbie doll houses, and by a man who, as I realised in that instant, sat behind spatially connecting us heavy, velvet curtain, has never really cared for me to have that photograph. I asked for it hoping for an ersatz of closeness, which he has been making a successful mockery of for some time now, an illusion I have been so foolishly scared to be voided of. A rejection has never felt so good. I learn today that Warsaw is made for acts of destruction and awakening. Like its entire existence. I didn’t expect to find myself in that photograph, and sure enough, I didn’t. Hoping for a mild case of arousal, I moved undone and, frankly, exhausted. And it was perhaps that lack of a feeling that I wanted to give in and have one more Polish Fizz, an emblem of new Poland, coupled with a material overdose of the city confused in its all-consuming options, that eventually led us to solitarily of the most beautiful place in the world. The National Museum’s Gallery of the 19th century art. It canvasses one final attempt to seal the old friendship deal. There are many classical pieces here seemingly overlooked in a mad rush to make it to Matejko’s monumental for my nation “Battle of Grunwald”. I do not like being overlooked. Thank you, Warsaw, for my awakening.