San Francisco never felt mine, the way Edinburgh feels mine 10 years on. Had I stayed in that city by the bay, that tall blonde ex, with time my feelings would have changed. But that city is so big as to feel unknowable, like I couldn’t ever expect to be able to wrap my metaphoric arms around it.

Things, places, people, buildings and cities though – they’re always each of them nearly infinitely complex. They might seem simple and intelligible at a first glance, but each has a long history, touching upon the histories of other people, places, materials, knowledge, discovery and machinery. And that’s before you even take a microscope to the physical object; materials, colours, molecules and atomic structure which all exist on a continuum between the big bang and the eventual death of our universe.

Our language, our stories, our reasons and explanations stretch over reality, help us feel some small measure of security when faced by this complexity and chaos.

They create a surface level of understanding, thin as a bubble’s rainbow swirling membrane holding in the warm roiling air, forming it into a shape we can name, giving us the sensation that we’ve contained or controlled that chaos… until the bubble bursts.

I wasn’t raised with faith. I wonder if it isn’t an entirely different strategy – an antidote or complement to the explaining and storytelling and figuring out that we’re doing the rest of the time.

Still, Edinburgh feels more mine than San Francisco ever did. It feels more knowable, as I can walk it, end to end, in the span of a day.