I like to stand on my balcony at 3 AM.

It’s never completely dark in the city – the glowing, diffuse light always finds its way around the concrete structures somehow. It’s nothing like the night in the place where I have grown up.

You can’t see or hear the people at this time. Sometimes, say every few minutes, there is some indication of human life besides me, the lonely guy standing in the chilly night with a plastic bottle of cleansed water. A police car roars. The sharp sound of a heavy keychain. Womanly laughter. A man coughs in a bed.

I know this is how it must feel to be in a city under siege. Sometimes I still have these dreams that I don’t know the reason for.

You may know that I’m in my thirties for some time now. The year has started wonderfully, and if it’s any indication of what is yet to come, then it gets to be a really interesting decade.

I have not become a different man on my birthday, not a more serious one. Not that I expected it, but still, it is good to be sure. I’m a member of generation X, we don’t really grow up, we just get older. But still, something happened.

Tired, I go to bed now. Today’s work does not indicate an end of something: altough we have passed a line, it’s just the beginning of the next stage. I get up in the morning and altogh the world will be different than it is now, I will be the same. This is a fitting metaphore for bigger things, like life itself. Things do change, but only slowly.