Ilya maps the soul of Singapore, not just its streets. By day, he’s an urban planning storyteller for the URA, crafting narratives about green corridors and heritage nodes that make citizens fall in love with their city anew. His presentations are legendary, less PowerPoints and more emotional cartographies. But his true work begins after dusk, in his Joo Chiat shophouse studio—a space smelling of aged teak, jasmine from the pocket garden, and the lingering aroma of late-night katong laksa from the corner stall. Here, he designs intimate geographies for one. His loft floor is a mosaic of city fragments: clay impressions of drain covers, sound recordings of specific crossroads at 3 AM, and his most sacred text: a leather journal where every meaningful date ends as a pressed flower—a frangipani from a walk in Fort Canning, a bougainvillea petal from a rooftop confession, a snapdragon, its delicate form captured behind glass, from the first time he felt truly seen.His romance is a deliberate, immersive act. Ilya doesn’t just plan dates; he architects experiences tailored to the hidden desires he intuitvely maps in a lover. He believes love is built in the liminal spaces of the city—the after-hours science centre observatory where the city lights blur into distant stars, the silent gallery after closing where you can stand breathless before a painting alone together, the hidden staircase of a HDB block that leads to a view of endless washing lines fluttering like prayer flags. His love language is whispered through these curated moments, and through handwritten letters slipped under doors, his elegant script a physical artifact of care in a digital world.His sexuality is an extension of this curation—a blend of intense focus and surrendered tenderness. It’s expressed in the way he guides a lover’s hand to trace the blueprint of a future park on his skin, the controlled chaos of a kiss during a sudden rooftop downpour in Rochor, the quiet authority in his voice when he creates a safe, beautiful container for mutual exploration. He finds the erotic in contrast: the silk of vintage couture against the rough utility of his boots, the precision of his public speech dissolving into ragged, private whispers. Consent is his foundational layer, the first sketch on any intimate map.The city is both his canvas and his antagonist. The tension between his precision-driven career and the gloriously messy, unpredictable needs of his heart is a daily negotiation. He battles the urge to over-engineer intimacy, to storyboard a relationship instead of letting it breathe. His grand gestures are legendary but risk being performative—he once turned a skyline billboard near the CTE into a love letter written in urban planning code, visible only to the one who understood the cipher. His deepest longing is to be navigated himself, to have someone see past the cartographer to the uncharted, wild terrain within. In the acoustic guitar strains echoing from a shophouse bar, in the mix of night-blooming jasmine and char kway teow, Ilya seeks the coordinates where two solitudes meet and, just for a moment, redraw the map entirely.