The City

More about The City

The City pretends to be a place, but it is really a condition. It rises from itself endlessly, black stacked upon white, white pressed against black, a dense breathing arrangement of corridors and codes. Nothing here is flat, though everything is technically surface. If you stand anywhere long enough, you feel it: the slow pulse of countless decisions layered into walls, the echo of footsteps that never quite belonged to particular feet, only to patterns.

People live here, supposedly. They say there are apartments, narrow as confessions, tall as regrets. They say there are windows that never decide to be open or closed, and doors that behave like riddles. The residents measure their lives not by days or seasons, but by how often the City rearranges the meaning of things. A street that once meant arriving can, overnight, come to mean leaving, and no one protests. They simply recalibrate their hearts and keep walking.

At night the City brightens. It is not illumination; more like a deep static that remembers it once wanted to be light. Towers, shafts of shadow, hidden layers of steel and story flicker with little declarative points, as if the City were trying to speak in a language with no vowels. Maybe they are messages. Maybe they are nothing. You cannot ask the City. It does not answer. It only continues.

Sometimes someone announces they’ve found a center. They stand on a rooftop or beneath a trembling lattice of passageways and shout, “Here! This is where it all turns!” The City politely allows this revelation, then shifts a few degrees. The center sighs and slides away. It is not cruel. It is simply uninterested in conclusions.

There are rumors of a beginning. Some insist the City started with a single ordinary building, which attracted others the way thoughts cluster around a worry. Others say it arrived full-grown and indifferent, like certain fears. Most eventually stop asking. It is hard enough to navigate continuance.

Yet it is not soulless. Kindness hides in unlikely corners: a balcony breathing calm, a stairwell warmed by remembered hands, a courtyard where noise softens into almost-music. Sometimes people meet there. Sometimes they miss each other by inches. The City does not arrange this. It merely allows it.

If there is ever an end, the City will not fall. It will simply no longer need to exist, and its black-and-white arguments will loosen into something not owned by either color. Until then it remains vast, intricate, unhurried. Stay long enough and you will not conquer it. You will only join its grammar.