For the past two weeks, other participants of the Net Survival Contest and I have been shut up in bare hotel rooms. Our daily link to the real world has been a computer that is hooked up to the Internet. We have relied on it, not only for food, bed sheets and other daily necessities, but also to set up an e-business of our own. Now it's time for me to walk out into the light of day again, but with a reluctance that I would have never felt fourteen days ago, I wonder if I really need to leave the safety of seclusion. Drawn blinds and the smell of plain white tees have become home to me. The darkness is my strong coffee, the silence my warmth. Exhaust from rush hour traffic wafts through the open every morning and evening, the last semblance of a schedule in my new life. Nine-to-five routine bleeds into three meals a day, and the weekends blur into even longer weekends. Prejudice fades to anonymity. We have all we need in these lonely, blank-canvas rooms. Everything we need to survive is here, without the incivility and the complications of the outside world. The thought of stepping out of paradise, if even only for a moment, is frightening.

It only takes moments for my shoes to be soaked through as I step out onto the street. I am jostled and pushed past, a fallen tree stubbornly refusing to move from the middle of an insistent river. Dark eyes coloured with the greens and reds and yellows of envy and aggression and greed don’t register an insignificant, faceless stranger. Hostile business suits and cell phones held to ears rush past me with raised briefcases as meager shelter from the wailing sky. The rain with its smell of a fading storm and its pitter-patter song is but an inconvenience to them. I want nothing more than to be alone in that street, for the business suits and the cell phones and the car exhaust to all disappear with the click of a mouse.

Rain kisses the top of a single black umbrella at the centre of a twisted city.

She watches through the window of the fifth floor, nose pressed against the glass pane. She wears a plain white tee and in her hand, there is a coffee mug. Our eyes meet, and in the middle of the bustling sidewalk, time slows a little bit and I share a tiny smile with her.