I entered the interior of the college, a beautiful inner plaza, simple and ornate all at once. José Clemente Orozco murals covered the walls, and I saw a team working to preserve one down the way. I wandered around, suddenly passing a humble outcove in the wall with the words “Octavio Paz and Marie José Tramini Memorial.” It was a simple white background with black text, almost a Word file version of a notice but set in stone. Is this it?

I’d already come across articles that recommended you should eventually just get out of bed. As 1:45 AM approached, I decided it’s time to try something different. I moved to my table and started to read. I’m enjoying a book of poems by Gabriel Okara, a Nigerian poet. I stared at the page a while, boiling as I thought ahead to the long day slouching my way.

It is strange to see a place that doesn’t exist. Recognizing that this is another project inside Neom, like The Line, and thus is not removed from my displacement by luxury, it is filled with awesome possibility (or outlandish promises like “Unusual Morphology”). And that has been the splinter in my mind about this place. Even if you wanted to, you could not go there.

It is important to know this right now: it is still happening.

The sea organ is an art installation built into the edge of the boardwalk that outlines the old town. At this edge of the city, the water laps up and against the cut stone, hitting the pipe structure underneath the steps to make music. As long as the waves come, the music plays.

Much of my sense of a third place is defined by one of my all-time short stories, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” by Ernest Hemingway. Even being a morning person, there is a need for a place in the night, and I think of this story at certain times. I so far have had no luck finding this place. I am sure it is out there somewhere. In my mind, this third place needs to have a patio, like the one in the story, so that I can be in the open air and in my feelings at the same time while I read or drink something. Or do what Matthew McConaughey was doing at the cafe.