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A city can be a shelter. There are storms that bring more than rain or snow, and the city can be a roof over your head and a wall around your heart. And Tymne, at the ends of the earth, is a city where you come when you need that shelter and can’t find anywhere else.
So it takes you a long time to realize that you’ve outgrown it, like a hermit crab outgrowing its shell. By the time you do you’ve got too much holding you there: you have a job, a house, a lover; you know the best places to get food and the best bookstores and all the shortcuts; and what’s more, you think of yourself now as a citizen of Tymne. When you travel, you can’t help comparing the ways and mores of the other city – even if it's the city you were born in – to the ways and mores of Tymne.
So you go back, and you look at houses in other cities, and sometimes you even talk to the people selling them, but you know, deep down, that you’ll never go, that if you went, all the belongings you couldn’t part with securely packed, you’d get a mile outside city limits and turn around.