5am city smell and the art of waiting

There's this stretch of pavement outside the hotel that smells like wet concrete and cold exhaust at 5am—no one ever asks for it, but I've memorised it anyway. Some mornings that's the whole shift: holding space for a silence that doesn't need fixing, just witnessing. My dead charger in the drawer is starting to feel like a relic of a time when I thought things could be mended.