I don’t mean this dramatically.

I mean it literally.

The woman on the overnight shift at the 7-Eleven near my apartment in Taipei has watched me buy oat milk and instant noodles in silk pants at 11:43 p.m., electrolytes and Pocari Sweat when I was sick, microwaved spaghetti after a bad date, and exactly one banana and a canned coffee on mornings when I was pretending to be the kind of person who had her life together.

She has seen me in mascara and without it. In office clothes and in an old green sweater I wear when I don’t want the world to ask anything of me. She has watched me arrive flushed from summer rain, from family phone calls, from low-grade heartbreak, from deadlines, from loneliness so ordinary it barely deserved the name.

I don’t know hers.

That may be the strangest part.

For years now, one of the most emotionally consistent relationships in my life has been with a convenience store that never closes.

In Taipei, this does not feel unusual. It barely even feels like a confession. Convenience stores here are so woven into daily life that they stop reading as stores at all. They become an extension of the sidewalk, the kitchen, the mailbox, the pharmacy, the printer, the emergency room for minor modern discomforts. You can pay bills, pick up packages, heat up dinner, buy socks, tea eggs, face wash, cold medicine, batteries, coffee, and, in a small emotional crisis, the temporary illusion that you are still being held by the world.

There are days when I think the city is really held together by municipal systems, labor, public transport, and real estate. Then there are days when I think it is held together by fluorescent lighting, refrigerated drinks, and the fact that someone will still sell you hot food at 1:17 in the morning.

That sounds cynical. It isn’t. Or not entirely.

When I first moved into my apartment, I told myself I would become the kind of woman who shopped at traditional markets in the morning, carried canvas bags, bought greens with intention, and knew what was in season without needing to look it up. That woman exists in Taipei. I see her everywhere. She has better posture than I do and probably cooks things with ginger and restraint.

Instead, I became a woman with a favorite convenience store cashier.

This, too, is a city type.

At first, I only went in for practical things: toothpaste, bottled water, phone top-ups, an umbrella I bought during a sudden downpour and lost three days later. But Taipei has a way of turning repetition into intimacy. You go somewhere often enough and it starts absorbing your life. The convenience store learns your hours before your friends do. It knows when you’ve started sleeping badly. It knows when you’re trying to save money. It knows when you’ve given up and bought the expensive strawberries in the clear plastic cup because the week felt cruel and you wanted a reward small enough not to count as self-destruction.

That is one of the quiet truths of solo urban life: your routines witness you.

Not your curated life. Your actual life.

The life in which you buy two boiled eggs and tissue packs and stand under bad lighting deciding whether sadness is a cup noodle mood or an onigiri mood. The life in which no one sees you spiral, exactly, but someone does notice that you came in twice in one day and looked more tired the second time.

I used to think intimacy required disclosure. A late-night conversation. A dramatic honesty. A naming. But cities like Taipei create another kind of intimacy, one built through repetition rather than revelation. The barista who starts making your usual when you walk in. The auntie at the breakfast shop who knows you want extra chili. The scooter mechanic who says nothing but checks your tires anyway. The convenience store clerk who doesn’t ask questions when all you buy is ice cream, aspirin, and a sports drink.

There is tenderness in being left alone correctly.

The convenience store near my apartment also serves as a kind of accidental diary of class aspiration. This is Taipei, where life can feel both efficient and exhausting, polished and precarious. The shelves are full of tiny upgrades for the overstretched self: collagen drinks, better face masks, imported chocolate, premium coffee, “healthier” instant meals, whitening serum, vitamin jelly, mood management in retail form. You can watch a whole economy revealing itself through what people grab on the way home.

Some nights the store is full of office workers buying neatly packaged dinners and strong canned cocktails. Some mornings it belongs to students, delivery riders, night-shift workers, older men reading quietly by the window counter, women in activewear buying coffee before sunrise as if discipline itself can be purchased in paper cups. The store flattens everyone for a moment. Under the same lights, we are all just people with needs that cannot wait until tomorrow.

That may be why convenience stores feel especially important in Asian cities shaped by overwork, density, and emotional self-management. They provide access without ceremony. They let you need something immediately and without narrative. They ask very little of you beyond enough money and the ability to point.

And yet, over time, they become full of narrative anyway.

My own 7-Eleven contains several versions of me. The newly independent one. The professionally ambitious one. The one who thought adulthood would look sleeker. The one learning that a life can be both small and full. The one who sometimes eats dinner from a plastic tray and still believes she is building something meaningful.

I have gone there after weddings and after medical appointments. Before early trains and after long nights. I have bought coffee before hopeful mornings and instant ramen before defeated ones. Once, after a call that left me shaken, I wandered the aisles for fifteen minutes pretending to compare yogurt drinks until I could get my face back into public condition.

No one interrupted me. No one hurried me.

That, too, was a kind of care.

We talk a lot about infrastructure as if it belongs only to governments, architecture, transit maps, and power grids. But emotional infrastructure matters too. The systems that absorb daily life. The places that catch people before they fall all the way through their day. In Taipei, the convenience store is part of that structure. Not glamorous. Not sacred. Not exactly human-scale, either. It belongs to chains and logistics and the strange genius of late capitalism. But inside that system, something recognizably human still survives.

A familiar nod. A remembered order. A place to stand under air conditioning at midnight and feel, for five minutes, less unmoored.

I still don’t know the cashier’s name.

But she has seen enough of my purchases to know when I am sick, busy, broke, lonely, functioning, pretending, or briefly thriving. She knows when I am buying for one. She knows when I have people over. She knows when I am trying, once again, to become the kind of person who buys yogurt instead of instant noodles.

I’m not saying she knows me deeply. I’m saying she knows I exist.

In a city this fast, that can feel surprisingly close to love.