I think I heard this on the radio, but it had the feel of a short story. This would have been some time in the last 5 years that I heard it, but I don't know how old the original story is. It was told in a contemporary English dialect, so probably 20th century or late 19th at the earliest. It had the feel of one of HP Lovecraft's dream cycle, although I went looking for it among his collected works and couldn't find it. The city may be Carcosa or perhaps I've mixed it up with some mythos stuff in the remembering.

The story goes that a traveller, possibly a musician, is wandering the land with the narrator, searching for the city the traveller was from. Wherever they go, the traveller talks about the gardens, the music and the people of the city and how he longs to see them again. They go to many wondrous places and see many marvellous things, but in the traveller's eyes, nothing compares to his homeland. As the story goes on, the narrator ages and becomes quite bitter towards the traveller, who never seems to age. The narrator wonders if he's wasted his life on the search, but the traveller continues on as before.

I don't know if I listened all the way to the end, but I think it ends with either the narrator dying or the two parting ways, and the traveller being implied to spend the rest of time searching for something that maybe never existed.

It's a tip of my tongue about a tip of my tongue. I'm also not sure whether I really did hear this story somewhere, if I dreamt it, or if it's a mishmash of a couple of things. I'd really appreciate your thoughts.