Cyprus greets you with lemon-scented air and limestone light. The airport hums—the murmur of arrivals, the shuffle of bags, the promise of a coastline you’ll feel more than see. I scroll through my phone, tracing the digital breadcrumbs that spin this trip into hashtags: #cyprus, #trendingreels, #viralvideos, #instagram, #instagood. Each tag is a small door to memory: a sunlit terrace, a friend’s smile on a screen, a top-wave moment caught mid-laugh. The plane slides into the sky and the world narrows to the slow arithmetic of clouds and the familiar weight of a window seat. From the air, Cyprus appears in fragments: a coast of turquoise, a thread of port towns, villages peeking out from under pines. On the ground, the airport is a hinge between departure and arrival, where languages mingle and names are tested on the tongue. A child with a bright backpack chases a sunlit reflection on the tiles; an old couple argues softly about taxi fares. And somewhere between the passport stamp and the luggage carousel, I realize the trip is as much about listening as it is about being seen. Cyprus itself is woven with small rituals—the crackle of a coffee cup, the scent of lemon and sea, the way doors open to blue domes and whitewashed walls. The towns move at their own pace, slow enough to let a memory land, quick enough to keep up with the next selfie or the next street musician. I walk a harbor where the water edits itself into silver, and the day folds into evening with a soft, edible glow. The hashtags drift to the back pocket of my mind, not forgotten, but quiet—like a distant chorus that still colors the air you breathe. Travel, I tell myself, is not a report to be filed into an online shelf. It is a negotiation with attention: the choice to see, and the choice to put the phone down long enough to listen to the wind move through an olive tree, or to hear a cathedral bell ring over a narrow alley. The feed will be there when I return, but the coastline will not wait. In Cyprus, I learn to measure time not by likes, but by the scent of citrus at dusk and the weight of a stone spent in the palm of a hand. And when the plane lifts again, I tuck the island into my breath and depart lighter, not with a collection of images, but with a memory that can be revisited without a caption.