Rummaging through the old drawers of memory, I accidentally stumbled upon a collection of Long Bien photos from fifteen years ago. It felt both hauntingly familiar and strangely new.
Some frames still glow with the parched golden sunlight of seasons past; others are steeped in the cold, grey hues of winter days by the river, or the dreamy, deep blues of an early morning before the city has stirred. Back then, the lens seemed obsessed with chasing the shifting moods of the landscape: at times capturing the interlacing iron spans of the Long Bien Bridge—like gaunt, aging witnesses to history—and at others, tracing the horizon across the Red Sea, quietly cleaving the vast void in two.
But looking back, what makes my heart skip a beat isn't the color or the light—it is the empty spaces. It is the stretch of water reaching toward infinity without a single high-rise crowding the view; it is the expansive sky that claims one’s entire vision. These are the "silences" of the past—places where one could still breathe in the freedom and stillness of a Hanoi that hadn't yet learned to hurry.
