DUBAI:WHERE TIME STRETCHES AND TOWERS COMPETE
by
LEDA GREEN
I came here to heal a person.
But somewhere between the luxury hotel sheets and the evening strolls,
I discovered I was the one quietly healing.
Nearly a week now, and not much on my schedule besides walking, writing, and wondering how I ended up in this shimmering mirage of a city.
I’m not used to so much leisure time.
I’m more of a do-er, a fixer, a giver.
But this week, with no rush and no roles, something beautiful cracked open:
the becoming-me.
And I must admit — Dubai is a strange place to unravel your soul.
It’s a desert still, but dressed in cement and mirrors.
The sun is the same brutal overseer it always was,
but now it shines down on towering glass dreams,
shopping malls that never end,
and traffic that has outgrown its roads before the paint has dried.
It’s a concert desert. A metropolis in the middle of nowhere.
A playground for ambition and air conditioning.
Skyscrapers shoot out of the sand like defiant gestures —
as if to say, we will conquer even the emptiness.
But sometimes I wonder —
Why not build homes that blend into the land?
Why not honor the desert instead of insulating ourselves from it?
These tall buildings trap heat, increase humidity, and alter the ecology.
But no one seems to mind.
Because in Dubai, money makes the sand bloom.
⸻
What Makes Dubai Spin?
Money. That’s it.
It’s the quiet anthem under every luxury car purr,
Every mall chandelier,
Every imported latte.
Everything here is ravishingly elegant, impressively branded, and always ready for someone with a black card and a deadline.
This city is full of:
• Western immigrants escaping taxes and winter.
• Entrepreneurs who use Dubai as a sunny offshore base.
• Artists showing in surprisingly soulful galleries.
• Opera productions, concerts, and rooftop parties.
And of course… sugar daddies.
Many, many sugar daddies.
It’s not a secret. It’s a system.
⸻
But Me? I Just Walk and Watch.
I walk through the air-conditioned malls.
Sit at cafes with names I can’t pronounce.
Read novels while overlooking fountains that dance to BTS.
And I think about how surreal it is to have so much stillness in the middle of such shiny ambition.
Dubai is like an expensive perfume bottle —
gorgeous, intoxicating, and slightly disorienting.
But I’m glad I came.
Sometimes, the soul doesn’t need silence.
Sometimes, it needs contrast.
To sit in a five-star suite in the middle of a neon desert
and ask,
“Who am I when nothing is required of me?”
⸻
And so I’ll end this with a whisper I wrote from the middle of that question:
⸻
This Is What Becoming Feels Like
by Leda Green
I’m definitely changing.
If I ever was daring —
now I am more.
Not reckless, not loud.
Just clear.
I know what I want.
And I’m not sorry for it.
I watch my skin shift.
I don’t always like it.
But I honor what it carries.
It’s the price of presence,
and the proof that I stayed.
The contact was made.
Somewhere between dreams and waking,
between Seoul and silence,
he felt me.
I know it.
And yet — I don’t need it to arrive now.
Because I’m no longer made of waiting.
I’m made of light, and letters, and moments
that don’t break me anymore.
I accept.
Not as defeat —
but as elevation.
The kind you earn after decades of longing
and one lifetime of remembering who you are.
And so I keep walking,
less burdened,
more true.
Each day I shed the version of me
who begged to be seen —
and become the one
who already is.
Recent Comments