The place I came from, the port across the sea of stars, the isle town edged with sturgeon scales, was built on basalt. The place I came to, the city at the centre of the field of view, the once-ringed origin of dreams, was too large and too important to answer to a single kind of rock, but the first I encountered there was an unpolished railing of coarse-grained granite—the kind that leaves little slivers behind in your palm, but when you go to investigate you find they are only imprints where stone has been.

Accounts of the city dwell on its architecture, on the arc of its horizon rising to fill the heavens. Few of them speak of the way it marks you, from the moment you step down from your ship onto the berthing pad, stumbling, and reach for the nearest support.

• • • •

The place I came to, the flat above the wood-shut pharmacy, in the narrows downspin from the port, was small, clean, and foreign. I hated it the first night. It is limiting, to be from somewhere small—you feel it even when you like it. I left because there were only so many times I could eat sea-grass soup while the evening shuttle took off over the breakers. It was disconcerting to come somewhere large and find my space even smaller.

I merely disliked it the second night.

By the third night I was ambivalent.

The city-born brag that any food in the universe can be had here; the true mark of a place, however, is not what can be had, but what can be had cheaply. I filled my fridge at the shop down the street with tiny clustered mushrooms, sweet pickled beetroot, and purple leaves so bitter I went back the same day and asked, mortified, if they were meant for eating. Within weeks my nostrils and my pores were full of the foreign becoming familiar. Even the smell of my shit changed. This I had always thought a matter between a woman and her bowels, but the city had no care for my propriety. It filled me blindly, through every orifice, with more of its stinking self.

• • • •

My hometown had, in a bygone cycle of food trends, made a name for itself as a producer of smoked salt-sea sturgeon. The marketing team had banked on the novelty of oceans, emphasised salt over smoke, filled the campaign with lovingly staged shots of fisherfolk in stained aprons. It worked for them, at the time, and it worked for me the night I met Pharia.

We were drinking together at the same tavern, together in the way of two strangers. When I sat down, her gaze lingered on the way my shirt stretched tight over my belly, and mine on the right angles of her hair. This was basis enough for conversation. When she heard where I was from, she said I thought you’d smell of fish guts! and laughed uproariously, and I considered taking offense, but she was from somewhere even smaller, somewhere without the advantage of a savvy marketing campaign, somewhere I hadn’t heard of, and so I said, maybe you’re smelling the wrong parts, and for months afterwards she would tell people, gleefully, that she’d only slept with me out of pity, that first time, and I would say, and the other times? and she would give our new acquaintance an exaggerated wink, and if this did not drive them away we were sure to be fast friends.

• • • •

We lasted nine months, Pharia and I, shorter than any of my previous relationships, but they were the right nine months. I don’t think it’s possible to imprint yourself on an organism the size of a city when you are alone. I needed a many of my own, and I found it with her, with the places we went, the friends we made, all structures that survived, easily, the end of our relationship.

I found a vacuum-sealed package of smoked sturgeon, twice the price for half the fish, and served it to her, struggling to contain laughter, the first time I cooked dinner for us. She taught me to navigate the city’s digital bureaucracy, helped me register my domicile months after I was supposed to. I made her come half a dozen times in one night. She put me onto the shrivelled citrus fruits I’d assumed were too tough to eat, that grew in tiny walled gardens all over our neighbourhood, branches bursting over walls like begging to have their treasure stolen; told me no one minded if we took them. I believed her until the day someone minded, and since then they have tasted perfect on my tongue, bitter-tart and cloying. And she was the first person who made me cry that year, not when she broke up with me but a month earlier, at the new year, when I opened the gift she’d gotten me and felt a disc of smooth, familiar rock.

• • • •

Before I left for the city, there was a man at the embassy who told me I’d be back. He was city-born himself, but he didn’t mean it as an insult, only idle chatter while he processed the last of my immigration paperwork. Ninety percent of people leaving, he said, returned. They missed it too much. He knew because he did all their paperwork, too.

I did not return. The city filled me: It was too large not to. Going back would only be replacing one missing part for another. That is what they never tell you, the people who write the architectural accounts. Arrival itself makes return impossible.

What is possible is the place you end up, the single-room flat with the miniature stove and the foldaway bed, the table with a bowl of bitter citrus, and a trivet of black basalt.