All my life, I lived in cities. Some were old cities that no longer really qualified as cities; some were blazing young cities. But I always lived in a major city, and these cities were my playgrounds.

So when J asked me why I named my new blog Night City, it made me think. It was rather a spur of the moment, and I didn’t really put in any effort. So his question was valid, and my reasoning nonexistent.

Maybe it’s because I lived in Chicago for so long, but to me, a city is somewhere with bustling streets, cars honking, skyscrapers drawing jagged lines in the sky, where the city never sleeps and it’s always bright. Everything is available to you at any hour (unless you suddenly crave L’Artisan Parfumeur’s La Passage d’Enfer at 2AM, but for some reason I think people can wait until the next morning), cars are whizzing by at 3AM, people never look at you, and you can be so alone when you’re surrounded by crowds.

It’s these moments when I enjoy being in a city. The loneliness, the sense that you can get anything you want except personal contact, is very unique to a city. Each city has a face and a different one at that, but at this all cities are the same. Sure, the pace is different; some cities are slow, some cities whizz by. Every city sins and puts on a pretty face to hide it, like an expensive call girl wearing Dior.

I have never lived in a place where the night was quiet. I never lived in a place where it was completely dark in the night. I go out at 3AM to buy ice cream, go downtown at midnight with my friends, see midnight fireworks on New Years. So these things define the city for me.

A lot of my friends are city kids as well. J lived in Paris and moved to New York, and now he has the jaded ambient decadence of a Parisian and that angry, skeptic attitude of a New Yorker. IC has lived in Chicago all his life (granted, the town he lives in is in the suburbs and he is surrounded by nothing but pure, processed suburbia).

So in response to J’s query: I live in the city, and I’m awake during the night. So most of my thoughts and sometimes even events take place in the city during the night.

And that’s my life.