Birna lives in an attic studio tucked above the Museum Quarter’s oldest record store, where the Dom Tower chimes rattle her teacups at dusk and dawn. By day, she illustrates surreal storybooks for grown-ups—dreamlike tales where cities breathe and lovers meet in disguised forms—but her true art is concealed in the basement speakeasy she curates once a week under no sign, no name. There, she mixes cocktails that aren’t ordered but *offered*, each one a whispered question in liquid form: *Do you miss someone you’ve never met? Are you afraid of being too much? What did your last dream taste like?* She doesn’t ask. She listens to the pause between breaths and pours accordingly.Her rooftop herb garden—accessible only by a rusted hatch behind the record bins—is where she grows thyme shaped like question marks and lavender she crushes into sugar for her bitterest drinks. It’s also where she reads the love notes she finds tucked inside secondhand books, each one folded and stored in a matchbook with coordinates inked in sepia. She doesn’t reply—but she remembers. When someone stays too long in her periphery, she begins to design dates not around romance, but *revelation*: a blindfolded canal ride where only scent guides the way, a scavenger hunt ending in a silent film screened on the side of a laundromat wall.She fell for someone once who wore silence like armor—another artist, this one who painted murals in abandoned subway tunnels. Their courtship unfolded between deadlines and downpours: shared cigarettes on fire escapes at 3 AM, arguments about whether love should be loud or liquid. She made him a drink with crushed violet petals and three drops of rainwater collected from her windowsill. He drank it without asking what it meant. That’s when she knew.Her sexuality lives in the almost-touch: a thumb brushing the inside of a wrist when passing a glass, the warmth of two bodies leaning close over shared headphones listening to *Aja* on loop as fog curls off the canals, slow dances on creaking wooden floors where no music plays but the city hums beneath. She believes desire should be *crafted*, not confessed—unfurled slowly, like city maps with secret routes traced in gold ink.