The City

Bear with me if you will.
A story.
About a boy and a girl and a city of 30 million, tall buildings, high heels, and the incredible thickness of fog.
Come with me if you can.
To a place set in a hyperreality where no one speaks the language you do and everyone wants to be your friend. A country you can traverse in five hours. Get a plane to the hottest beach in just four hours. Where you can be a million different things: a traveller, a teacher, a lover, an explorer, or a mystery.
(But please know, this is a place I can never call home.  I would rather be lost forever in a shitstorm of incognito than to call a fraction of this place my home. Isn't that what we all are searching for in the end? Home.)
So the story takes place here.  A mini Tokyo you can say, bright blazing neon lights, the trains, the push of a couple million people passing you on the sidewalk in designer labels and 6 inch heels.  There is not one day at all you cannot look your best in this place, or else you'll sink, sink into obscurity and unimportance. Can you, one person, go up against 50 million?
***
In this grassless metroplitan, in the cracks on the sidewalk and empty holes, the girl learned how to drink tequila and whisky.  She learned how to talk in another language without using any words in that language.  She learned how to sit in three hour bus rides to get to the city, she knew what it took to feel warmth from bar lights and the crowds of new people. 
In this new world, the guy learned how to eat using chopsticks and sit cross-legged during dinner time.  He learned how easy it was to charm, how impossibly simple it was to elicit high pitched squeals of laughter and smiles at any chance.  He learned how to break hearts and how easy it came to him, like skipping stones across a pond.
It was in this place, this quasi-reality, that she realized how much more things hurt with age.  In the innocence of youth, things heal impossibly fast.  Broken legs, sprained ankles, cuts on your arms, falls from tree houses, and even sickness.  When you're older, things take their time to heal again. Broken hearts can bleed out for excruciatingly long times.
***
It was in this city where their two worlds collided.  

"What am I about?
To me individually, to my heart has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable by reason, and here I am obstinately trying to express that knowledge in reason and words."