I decided to go outside. I found a bag with a wallet and some money in it and a set of keys, which I tried out on the door to my apartment. They fit, so I locked the door behind me and I made my way down the stairs. There was a key that fit the door to the street as well, and I let it shut behind me as I went out.

The wind was doing cartwheels and handstands along the street, and I wrapped my coat around me and started to walk. The street was full of shops and food stalls and the buildings were all the same height as my building. Most of them were brick painted in different colors and there were a lot of people walking around but they didn't look at me. It was so crowded it was festive and I felt as though I was at a carnival or a fair, looking at all the colors and shapes like they were rides and attractions.

I kept walking. I was feeling my way around my own emotions like a blind man walking through a room full of furniture. It was as though I'd come back to a place where I used to live, a place that was really important to me, after having been away for years, and I'd found that everything had changed, that nothing was the way I'd remembered it. Except that it was me who was the unfamiliar landscape. I'd gone away and I'd left myself behind to live in the changed world that I now was, and I felt the kind of panic someone would feel if they opened their eyes in the darkness and then realized that it wasn't that there wasn't any light around them, it was that their eyes couldn't see anymore.