The city never slept, and neither did she. From her window on the fourteenth floor, she watched the grid of lights pulse and falter like a living thing — a thing that breathed and forgot and breathed again. She had been here three weeks. It felt like a decade.

She set down her coffee and looked at the blank document for a long time. Words would come. They always did, eventually. But today the silence had a quality to it she couldn't name — not empty, but full of something unspoken. Something waiting.

She thought about what her professor had told her in that seminar room years ago: "Writing is not expression. Writing is discovery." At the time she had nodded politely. Now she believed it with her whole body.

The cursor blinked. She began.

She closed the laptop. Outside, the city was still going — indifferent, enormous, relentless. She had known, on some level, that this was how it would end. Not with a bang but with a realisation so quiet it barely registered. She would need time to understand what it meant.

But first she needed sleep.