On the few times he left my dwelling on those days, a palpable sense of lostness lingered. As usual, I turned to the window view. Perhaps altered by my approaching exit, or perhaps it just did anyway, the vista shimmered with double the luminosity I’d seen the previous nights: the bulbs in fellow hotels, round-the-clock offices, business-district apartments and whatever else dazzling. Sequins made planets across that galaxy panorama.

The spectral special. The faraway spectrum. It exaggerated the idea that I was a long way from what was familiar to me: after all, I knew these tower-crammed downtowns were another place, a bigger arena, with everything large scale. The super-size city. The megatropolis. Spectacular and definitively different.

I believed I was in it, yet it wobbled, brittle, and felt remote. The neighbours were there, sometimes even seen as eerie, fading silhouettes, momentarily in the adjacent towers, but everyone seemed unreachable, while the core of the place was untrackable too – existing only as a semblance, a shared atmosphere that was ingrained but invisible. An expected notion.

Viewing the scene again, I played with the thought that I’d refuse to go home and then grow obsessed in my efforts to reach the true soul of the city, trying to find the answers, attempting to become part of it. I grinned in that hotel room, in despair, knowing I wouldn’t, and that I couldn’t do any such thing. It existed just beyond clarity. It was getting late again, now, in this corner of a massive place.

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