Fragments of a city

I don’t expect you to understand.
You have seen none of this, you could not imagine it.
When you live in a city, you learn to take nothing for granted.
Close your eyes for a moment, turn around to look at something else,  and the thing that was before you is suddenly gone.
Nothing lasts, you see not even the thoughts inside you.
And you mustn’t waste your time looking for them.
Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.
In spite of what you would suppose, the facts are not reversible.
Just because you are able to get in,  that does not mean you will be able to get out.
Entrances do not become exits,  and there is nothing to guarantee that  the door you walked through a moment ago will still be there  when you turn around to look for it again.
That is how it works in the city.
Everything you know the answer to a question,  you discover that question makes no sense.
That is what the city does to you.
It turns you inside out.
It makes you want to live,  and at the same time it tries to take your life away from you.
After much careful study,  I can safely report that the sky here is the same sky as the one above you.
We have the same clouds and the same brightness, the same storms  and same calms, the same winds that carry everything along with them.
If the effect are somewhat different here,  that is strictly because of what happens below.
The nights, for example, are never quite what they were at home.
There is the same darkness and the void thrusts you forward, without respite.
And then, during the days, there is a brightness that is sometimes intolerable  - a brilliance that stuns you and seems to blanch everything,  all the jagged surfaces gleaming, the air itself almost a shimmer.
The light forms in such a way  that the colours become more and more distorted,  with a random, hectic pulsing along the edges.
Temporary, irregular and intangible.
 

These are fragments of a city.