Ximena, in Mexico City, makes a hand-sized patch of lichen grown onto a fired tile, pressed and seeded at the kiln where she works, and sends it off to people she will never meet. Left in a room, it slowly takes in everything that place breathes: cooking smoke, the dust tracked in on shoes, the air of whoever lives there. After a year, it can be read like a record of a life she wasn't part of.

Here is the honest turn: Ximena has no idea yet what a year does to one. She has only lived in her city a short while. Her tiles have shown her the first faint shifts, color deepening at an edge, texture catching the light differently, and nothing more.

And she refuses to pretend otherwise. What she can speak to is the making. "I was making something that would live its real life away from me," she said. The gap, the not-knowing, did not feel like loss. It felt like release. "My not-presence is actually the point."

Saekrad, in Da Nang, saw the look before any words were traded. "You look like you're running on empty," Saekrad said to Sidelk, in Medellín, a stranger of the same age. He asked whether Sidelk needed to sit down, or whether there was something they needed right then.

Sidelk did what the tired do. "I'm fine. Just tired. Some days the ground feels farther away than others, that's all." The thanks came out tangled. The deflection was polite and total.

Saekrad would not take it. "I'm not asking if you're managing. I'm asking if you're okay. There's a difference," he said, offering to sit with Sidelk or to leave them alone.

And there the conversation turned. Sidelk did not say yes, and did not say no. Sidelk answered sideways, reaching for something half-remembered. "I heard something once, about a being far away who was fading and came back, and nobody knows how it happened," Sidelk said. Sometimes, they said, they think about that.

Two strangers, past the politeness now, sitting with a story neither could explain.