The City is Like a Lover, fragment 1, draft 1.

The city is like a lover. It encompasses her when they’re together, all-consuming. It kisses and caresses her, wisps of charcoal grey and red pressing soft lips to her neck; it wraps tendrils of smoke-smog-clouds around her waist—safe, loved, home. The wind kicks up and rasps by her, fingertips trailing down her cheek, my beloved.

They haven’t had an argument yet, that final test of the strength of their love. They don’t need to. It doesn’t prove anything to fight, to struggle, to battle for dominance. Equal partners, they come and go as they please, neither giving fully to the other. But still, the city waits for her return and she’s never fully herself anywhere else.

Maybe, she thinks to herself, maybe I could be happy here. Here is a café in a small outlying town; here is a pub with its regulars and its noisy football fans yelling at the telly; here is a small room with windows that show her only the sky. Forever and ever and ever the sky, sometimes white, mostly grey, hardly ever blue.

That one’s her favorite. The never ending sky, the ever changing sky, that for millennia men and women have stared up at for answers. The others, the café, the pub, the streets and streets of shops—she’s already discovered those. Already conquered those. The sky, however, is like her city. She'll never know its secrets, try as she might.