𝓐𝓵𝓸𝓷𝓮 𝓘𝓷 𝓐 𝓒𝓲𝓽𝔂

There is a side of a city you will not be able to see clearly until you're by yourself. There is a whole separate world mapped alongside the one you've occupied before; the city and its double, revealed to you only gradually as you wind your way down another heavy-carpeted hallway in a luxury hotel. It moves in a different way to the normal one and throbs with immediacy and abandonment.

In this fairly new city, you will drink and talk for hours, but it will seem only like a blink. When you take your clothes off, and stand naked before another, time will stand still for a beat. When you make love, you'll wish to remain in that moment of delicious surrender forever.

In harsh light of day, you will walk past places you've never noticed before, or had never been allowed into, and think of the memory you made there with a relative stranger. No one else will know. You'll smile to yourself at the memory of this other geography. Erratically, unable to sleep, you will rise from a new bed and look down on the city from a penthouse vantage point. It will appear almost unrecognizable still. This cannot be the place that you have often battled through and been relentlessly buffeted by. When you first came here it felt almost crushingly huge, and now it's silently spread out for you behind glass. Yours to be devoured.

In this city, rules are different. Here, you can take what you want and refuse to apologize for it. Here, you have come to understand what power can feel like. You are a vixen, and every night you feel yourself awaken below a moon that is full and bright. This world is made and remade each night, after dark. The night knows you by the name you gave yourself, the name which suits your penchant for wilderness. It is the name that lovers mutter in reverie, that you wear like lingerie underneath a sexy dress. This name is your calling card now, it opens doors. Not that it really matters; people remember faces, not names, and from the occasional winks that bell boys and maitre d's give you, you know they remember yours. They are your silent co-conspirators.

You will rarely see your flatmate, but she will provide the faint metronome of the world you left behind. She's asleep when you get home at night, so you slip off your heels and try to be quiet. She will make a large pot of hot cocoa each morning, and leave you enough for a cup when you emerge. That cup is almost cold, but the remnants of her 9-5 leave you colder. That place seems unfamiliar now, and you struggle to remember how to speak the language. The tongue of this new city is brazen and honest. People have different names but they tell you deeply personal truths.

This city exists in the space between your gaze and a lover's, in the dwindling gap between your bodies as they draw closer together in the backseat of a car. Its trace is in the scuffed-up red soles of your favourite Louboutins stilettos. You catch it in a sudden wisp of certain perfumes, or when you wrap yourself up against the cold air in that beautiful coat someone gave you. You think of him, of the warmth of bodies, as you pull it around you and stride out into the night, and realized that this hidden city was your home all along.