i once believed all paths would lead me to you.

i wandered the perimeter of the city at night trying to locate the edges of reality, where a swatch of moonlight on asphalt would transform into a twitching neon green lattice. finding no evidence to support my suspicions that this might be a simulation, with time i came to accept the notion that my experience was real. with it came the heaviness of mortality & the crippling consequence of choice.

i ceased to visit the outskirts & instead ventured toward the city-center, where the houses & apartment buildings rub shoulders with the old warehouses & textile mills, & the sky is black but for the buzz of the light pollution, the emerald glow of a traffic light maddening in the way in which it imitates the growing blue blanket of dawn hours too soon. each minute is fragile & fleeting.

and so i met people & i willed myself to love fiercely, defiant of the timepiece shackled to my wrist & the clockface illuminated in the sky downtown. i had but two states of being: deliriously lovesick or devastatingly heartbroken. to be alive & to feel was to be ill, in one way or another. i still believed, though, that even my most circuitous route would at last guide me to you.

i may have been wrong.

perhaps you can accomplish what i could not. step into my skin, stranger, & you will become me: a twenty-something woman, fortified by alcohol & self-reflection alike, though in different ways. perhaps too reclusive for your own good, friday evening hovers near like the promise of a lover's kiss.

nsfw. adults only. cw: alcohol