The worst is in elevator lobbies.

I doubt this is the most humid place in the world—though it probably comes close—but the thing about the humidity here is that it isn’t just humid. It is, for lack of a single adjective that can accurately describe the cocktail of sensations: muggy and enveloping, adhesive and gross, omnipresent and omnipotent, and yes, humid, too. It hits—no, smothers—you the instant you step out of your building, a taxi, the bus, or as the escalator leading out of the MTR station pulls you within striking distance. An automatic layer of tiny beads of water settles on any uncovered part of your body, and they just sit there, chilling, until you step back into air-conditioning or go for the impractical, short-term kill, whipping out your pocket pack of kleenexes.

Then, just when you think you’ve escaped for the evening, tucked away from the pre-precipitation in your refrigerated apartment, you step out of the elevator onto your floor’s elevator lobby and the parts of your body, mind, and soul that value dry comfort die a small death. Because in this most fleeting of hallways, some kind of magical one-way ventilation allows for all 34 degrees of heat and 98 percent of humidity to get in but none of it to get out. All of a sudden, the 20-pace walk to your apartment door feels like the mile runs they made you do in the Septembers of your elementary school life, and you take longer than you ever have before to fit your key into the keyhole because, you know, you fumble that kind of thing when you’re anxious and sweaty.

This isn’t a complaint. Complaints aren’t usually littered with flowery phrases and run-on sentences. If you haven’t noticed already, this, if anything, is my ode to the humidity, because if the worst is in elevator lobbies, then the best is that it makes me absolutely certain I have arrived home. Taipei has a little less and Shanghai has a lot more, but there is no place this side of the asteroid belt with quite this kind of grime in the air as Hong Kong.

Except maybe a few neighborhoods on one of Venus or Mars’s gassy satellite moons. Which makes you wonder whether people who live in these kind of environments might be the only human beings who could survive on another planet. Setting up a colony in nitrogen-filled atmospheres can’t be too different from queueing up for a bus in Causeway.

Causeway Bay, incidentally, was the first place I returned to on a hyper quest, still ongoing, to hit up all the parts of the life I used to live in as short a period of time as possible. In less than a week, I have consumed bargain salmon sushi from CitySuper, ridden up and down the escalators at Times Square, stocked up on G2000 shirts, had dessert at Felix, walked along the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront to see the view I will never tire of, eaten dinner at the Country Club, sung through a roster of the usuals at Red Box (Plus!), wandered around Pacific Place as an Amber Rainstorm Warning hovered overhead, all while getting the nervous extra beeps each trip through the MTR turnstiles because I’m still using the Student Octopus Card I illegally obtained seven years ago. And before week’s end, you can be sure, I will have downed some of Lan Kwai’s finest before turning to either some chicken rice or chao-ed gong zai meen to satisfy my hunger for food at three a.m. and to quench my thirst for home.

And so my love affair with this city continues, described with a shitload of words and yet still undefined, because it feels more than just a little weird to be back for real. I have no departure date this time around, no semester waiting for me around the corner, no biting urge to stuff as much fun as possible into three weeks of immune system hell. This time, my sleep follows—or at least resembles—a sane routine, the ever-decreasing balance in my bank account is actual reason to worry, and weirdest of all, I have to live with the constant change this place is famous for undergoing.

In a class I took on global modernism in architecture, the professor borrowed the phrase, “creative destruction,” to describe the way Hong Kong always seems to be rebuilding itself. For the last four years, I’ve only ever been privy to the creative part, because when you’re only back for brief holidays, you only notice the new things that have popped up, and sometimes not even those. You expect things to be different, without the need to understand the differences because the next time you’re back, it’s all different again.

But when you know you’re here for longer than just an interlude, you sense the destruction, too. Not in a negative sense; just the sense of being more involved as your surroundings evolve. Because home, I’ve learned, is organic. It lives and breathes and sweats and bleeds and, if it’s Hong Kong, it sweats some more.

Especially in elevator lobbies.

Keane Shum