This was the drawing I kept turning upside down. Each time I thought I had found the horizon, another part of the city insisted on being above it. In the end I chose a viewpoint that a reader could understand, knowing that the choice would make the place look more ordinary than I remembered.
The central ring is drawn too evenly. In memory, its surface contained several layers moving at different speeds. I could not hold that movement in pencil without making the structure look damaged. The small studies in the margin are attempts to show how the walkways joined. None of them is a technical diagram. They are records of attention, and sometimes of attention failing.
There was a terrace on the near side where I sat until the nausea passed. I have left it almost empty here. It matters to me as the place where a cup of water made the enormous view bearable. The person who brought the cup is not in the picture. I remember them clearly enough to know that adding an uncertain likeness would be less honest than leaving the space.
The paper tone was chosen to keep the marks warm. My first version was made on bright white drawing stock, and every tower looked cold. That was wrong. However strange the scale, the city felt inhabited and maintained. The golden light in the remembered scene was not an effect laid over the buildings. It seemed to be part of their use.
I have linked the account below because the drawing does not contain the sound, the strange moving grain beneath my hand, or the way Sael waited while I tried to understand the distance. The two records disagree in places. That disagreement is useful. A picture can make a memory appear more settled than the person who made it actually feels.
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