Sentence Imitations

I was then living on the top floor of a ludicrously grim hotel on the Rue du Bac, one of those enormous, dark, cold, and hideous establishments in which Paris abounds that seem to breathe forth, in their airless, humid, stone-cold halls, the weak light, scurrying chamber-maids, and creaking stairs, an odor of gentility long, long dead.
Equal in Paris - Baldwin

SENTENCE STRUCTURE
Appositive
Long interruption with many modifiers

My imitation:
I was then living in New York, on the west side of Brooklyn in a tiny studio apartment, one of those rooms which is hardly the size of my childhood bedroom, a room that seems to hide -- within its paper-thin walls, and its dingy 1950's-esque wall paper, underneath the sunken in couch cushions, and within each drop from the persistent leak of the faucet -- a secret lurking from long, long ago; a secret that haunts me every night as I attempt to get a few hours of fitful, restless sleep.

But each has paid, and is paying, a different price for this "common" language, in which, as it turns out, they are not saying, and cannot be saying, the same things: they each have very different realities to articulate, or control.
If Black English Isn't a Language, then Tell Me, What Is? - Baldwin

SENTENCE STRUCTURE
Them Vs. Us
Multiple interruptions
Parallel structure
Colon : simpler explanation

My imitation:
He noticed that they had lived, and still were living, a lie, in which, as it turns out, they had been weaving for years: he never really loved her, and she never really loved him.