I was standing in the Chinese Garden, wrapped in that false serenity, staring out through carved wooden windows that felt more like portholes into another dimension. Inside: koi drifting like lazy hallucinations, red lanterns swaying in the breeze, the faint perfume of blossoms that didn’t belong to this century. Outside: Portland. Raw, twitching, stinking Portland.

The photo caught it all, framed perfectly, like the city was putting on a show just for me. A runner blurred past, skin slick with health and privilege, pounding the pavement like the city was just another training ground. Behind him, sprawled against the brick wall, was a man crumpled in sleep or something darker. A body on pause. You couldn’t miss it, not if you looked. And yet the runner did. He always does. That’s the trick of the city: two worlds colliding on the same block, pretending not to notice each other.

Through the ornate lattice, it was like I was spying on a stage play. The Garden framed the chaos outside as art, lines, symmetry, balance, but the truth was savage. The Garden was a bubble, a hallucination of peace stitched into the belly of decay. It kept the madness at bay, but not out of sight. The window reminded me that beauty here was conditional, temporary, an illusion propped up by walls no thicker than denial.

The real Portland was out there. Joggers sprinting past the collapse, shoppers sipping iced lattes a block away, politicians arguing over zoning while tents multiplied like weeds in their blind spots. Inside the Garden, I could almost believe in order, in calm, in some ancient rhythm of existence that made sense. But the second my eyes drifted out the window, the spell broke. I wasn’t in China, I wasn’t in paradise, I was in Portland, Oregon, staring into the teeth of America’s contradictions.

This is why I bring the camera. The lens doesn’t blink, doesn’t soften the blow. It catches the collision of two worlds and nails it to the wall: the jogger in mid-stride, the man on the ground, the Garden framing it like some cruel joke about perspective. You can sip tea among lotus flowers and still be within earshot of the city’s death rattle.

That’s the madness. That’s Portland. A place where you can stand in paradise and still smell the piss wafting in from the street. Where beauty is always twenty feet away from collapse. Where the Garden and the gutter are separated only by a window frame.