Cities have distinct personalities. It's a matter of knowing it.

You sense my loneliness, (...) my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I'm evil, that I don't deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals. But these things don't stop me, Mother. I'm too strong for them to stop me. As you said yourself once, I am very good at being what I am. These things merely now and then make me suffer, that's all

Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt

For several long moments we remained locked together, and I think I covered her hair with small sacred kisses, her perfume crucifying me with memories.

So we reach into the raging chaos, and we cling to it, and we tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.

One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.

I resolved to move just a little bit more slowly through the world, to look around myself with greater care, and to try to remain conscious of all that was going on around me at all times.