The nighttime has hit you as quickly as the afternoon, the morning, the threshold of time. The toes of dusk. The silent shadows descending like stormfront ninjas.

You walk when you could fly. You use your feet when you could use wheels. You've learned to become cautious of this aimless urge long ago—otherwise it would be a waste of fuel. A waste of energy.

Time. Such a waste of time. Always.

The city stretches before you like an unmowed lawn. The clouds hovering overhead beneath a cosmic huddle of pinpricks. You know that which is in your reach. The lengths of the beastly bound or the width of an avarian embrace. You deny both and stick to the alleyways, the concrete, the rubble and rubbish and runs runs runs runs runs….

It is a Friday night. Or maybe a Monday night. No matter. They've grown interchangeable in your cranium this past year or so. 'Or so'… … …it takes an older life to imagine 'a year or so'.

Older. But not necessarily bolder. Not like you were promised. Well, it wasn't a promise, really. More like a good incentive. Sugar coated. Situated inside a cage of cotton candy (barbed wired)—your tongue explores, implores, comes up empty, and worms back into your cerebral cortex with a puff of surrealistic subtlety.

Main Street. The shopping districts. The sidewalks. The families and business agents and hobos-a-plenty. The banks—closed. The offices—closing. The nightclubs—open. You don't step anywhere near the latter. Sometimes you wouldn't bother even protecting the latter. Sometimes you have to remind yourself you're strong, you're more-or-less reliable, but you're not really in charge. You leave the seat down on the toilet seat because that's what they all tell you to do. Cleaning your room. Taking the garbage out and doing laundry duty—though you really don't mind that anymore. You don't mind—or you don't care. You haven't figured it out quite yet.

You go out for walks. And more walks. And more. And more.

The pizza parlor. You sit in the middle. Smack dab in the middle. A table all to yourself. A glass of soda with a straw as you wait, wait, wait to dig into a dish of that which the stomach-tempting fragrances prophecy. You look over your left shoulder. Your right. A peripheral world beyond the edges of your jacket's hood. The people. The families. The children. The pizza. The mouths. The mouths. The mouths.

You are on your death bed. And you close your eyes for just a gasping second—and you can see all their faces and cheese/greese stains like it was just yesterday. Or so you imagine: for when such an inevitable evening comes. This thought always comes to haunt you. What will be your last thought before you 'go'? Will it be of this night out? This very second? The way your are seated. The jacket you are wearing, the jeans, the underwear. Your legs, knees, feet and shoes. The way your genitalia are positioned. The itch on your left thigh. The copper taste of last night's battle still bruising your inner lips. If you close your eyes and keep your shaking fingers still, you can swear that your left leg switches with your right. You breathe deeper to focus and remind yourself of how alive you are. The nervous system realigns itself. There's almost a tingle to your body. From your rectum to your skull. From your left ribcage to your right. Organs. Muscles. Blood and meat and blood and meat and blood and meat…

…will you feel all of this the night when you will no longer be given the chance to feel all this? Or perhaps your last thought is about a person. An individual in your life. The police officer's frown as he stepped you up the house's doorstep with the glass-breaking baseball in his gloved grip. The kindergartener's missing teeth as she sobbed from a bee sting. Your first puppy and the way his left eye squinted everytime you scratched him in a good spot. The eye that refused to close the next morning when for some reason you couldn't stop crying.

Or her face. Her smile. Limbs of a deer that could wrestle the arms of a gorilla. The cape-like swish of her hair and the polished porcelain face gently nestled underneath—no. No, no, no—your last thought will not be about her. Your present thoughts aren't even about her. You've decided upon that. For the last few months, you've battled with yourself to come to that conclusion. Not her—never her. Never—

The waitress places down the pan pizza atop your table. You give her the money. The tip. You even lie the pen she lent you at an angle on the table's edge as if to offer a chance at an autograph—but no words are spoken. She does her task silently, more or less to your surprise.

Perhaps it is a Monday night.

You pull one slice. You hold it in your hand. You pause. You look around you. You realize that everyone surrounding you is your age—or just about. Or older. A little older. In fact, you've always… …always felt that everyone you knew was somewhat older than you. Even the younger ones. These people are not silent creatures. Nor are they even half as gray as the night overhead suggests. They are talking. Chatting. Laughing. Flirting. Caucasian dimples. Batting eyelashes. The hair toss and the neck scratch. The spittake and the howling laughter at every rude joke, raunchy joke, pathetic joke. Every joke you've ever heard before. Every joke you've ever used, invented, employed yourself. The invitation to a Hollywood cricket symphony or an uncomfortable orchestra of silence in the hallways of a granite-cold headquarters.

You shift about. You straighten your shoulders. You sit upright. You're out in the open. In the dead center of everyone. There's no umbrella over your table. You even go so far as to lower the hood of your jacket. Exposing… …Insisting… … Existing.. ….But not controlling.

Nothingness reigns supreme. You expect it. You have been a lot…lately. You breathe it off and raise the slice of pizza to your lips, but yet again you pause. And you cringe. And you ultimately slump back and sigh with the realization that you haven't had a single evening in recent memory where you've been truly, legitimately hungry. And this is one such blasted night.

The Bay. The Boardwalk.

You continue strolling. You walk off the pizza dinner you didn't even bother eating. The cinnamon roll dessert you didn't even bothering ordering. The gastro-intestinal horrors of the past that you can't deny having once devoured with the fervor of a tape worm with legs. But now you have no appetite for the candy-coated novelties of yesteryear. And, fancily, you have very little desire for the protein-pumped necessities of tomorrow, or such is your excuse. You could be pathetic. Or you could be emo. Or you could be asleep.

This could all be a dream. And those godawful street bikers tossing garbage at the seagulls and laughing their bearded faces off could just be figments. They are ants on the black plastic garbage bag of the Ocean. Pivot the bag towards the stars and they curl up and die like burning pretzels. You sniff out their remains and feel a scant reminder of the African jungle. Something in nature always screams of 'death'. In all your smiling days you never once forgot the cold hand of Loss ever-permeating the animal world. Every instinct is tied to it. Every emotion and every ambition is marionette-string'd to it. Perhaps all this time you were denying it. Or maybe it was all just your way of accepting it. You keep existing, inventing new ways to do it with each passing night.

To what end? This is a night of nothingness. The wandering. The wandering.

You know that there is so much that you want to do. So many things. So many naughty things. So many virtuous things. So many places. So many people. All the contours and surfaces you could touch. You could smell. You could lick. You could hump, or sob on, or curl up against.

This is not a cold world. It is just an incorporeal one. You realize that with every evening and the grayness it brings to the back doors of your eyes. Escape routes for a restless soul in the graveyard of monotony. You buy things to keep yourself distracted. You go places to keep your blood circulating. But everynight, you fight it like a butterfly stuck in the killing jar. A zebra in quicksand. A drop of water trying to climb its way up the inside of a straw with a flea stuck inside, treading treading treading and turning still, but not dead. Never dead. It's so hard to kill a flea. You know. You've been one.

Giggles. You look to your right. A clique of wayward schoolgirls have gaggled their way to a spot on the boardwalk where they are all goofily posing for an estrogenical photo shoot and not a single one of them looks half as old to allow the flimsy fashion that they're so saucily adorned in. Lampshade skirts. Bare shoulders, bare midriffs. Half of the bellies pierced, the other half tattooed. The only betrayal of youthdom is the baby fat still clinging to their cheeks.

You walk straight past them. None of them says a thing—at least not to you. Not a single eye catches sight of you, or at least not in a way to send a message to their feminine brains and spark a nervous reaction. All the same, you noticed them, but only for the sake of noticing them. You sigh. And you swear. You're impotent these days. Or maybe you're unhappy. Or maybe you're jaded—but how can you be? A virgin is only as experienced as the mind allows. Flesh is made only to bleed or to do its darnedest not to bleed. There is nothing but juices to be had in sex. Nothing but smoking guns and empty barrel chambers. The queer feeling of a thunderous echo needle-pricking your ear and there's nothing that can be done about it.

Her voice. Her breath. Like lilies in the wind. That one night on the couch. The clothes stayed on—but….Dear God, her arms. Her flower-petal eyes when she was sleeping so soundly, so beautifully… …you swore that not a single creature could find greater peace when dead.

You clench your eyes shut. You stick your hands in your pockets. Deep in your pockets—which have become a desperate home for them these days.

Peace is for the peaceful, and nothing else. And what are you? You are going for stroll. Because… ….because… ….because… …

You are going for a stroll.

The park. West of Downtown.

Your hands are still in your pocket. But you are sitting down. And—in the spare hours that sane 'daytime' has to give—you watch couples come and go in the dark. The later the hours, the older the people. You have no qualms about this. You know you can more than protect yourself in the event that a mugger comes. Maybe you want a mugger to stroll on by. Maybe you want to spill blood, crunch bones, make bruises. That's all it really is—if you look at it in a certain light. The one light that's been guiding your feet and paws and wings these days. The light that never is really there.

What are you doing? What is your purpose in life? What is this daily fight worth? Will it matter if you are here to do the very same thing tomorrow afternoon? Will one more headline in the paper make you the God everyone hopes and dreams to be? And what of the insectoid humans on this planet who don't have it nearly as well as you do? For that matter—what if you were one of the people you protect? What would your purpose in existence be then? Would it be any more important? Any less? How much do they want to be with you? How much would they want to be you? Do they even think about it? Rather, do they even think about it in such a way that you yourself are thinking about it right now? But how can they even think of you when they don't even see you?

And they don't see you. Or at least, they don't look at you. They don't say anything save for the lovey-dovey chatter of coupled romance. The couples with their dogs, dogs that won't even glance your way. Must be night-blind. You hear poems. You smell perfume and cologne performing a musky dance in the air. Trailing scents that only a blood hound could tell between here and the nearby hotels. The panting and the weeping that is certain to follow. You could even squint your eyes and see across the park in the lamplight and swear that the one man is fondling his girlfriend a hundred yards away—wait, it's not an assault. They're just getting frisky. It's just as well. You're not really in the mood to start pouncing anyone, anything, anywhere.

Here… …

You're tired of being here. Or perhaps you're not even here. Or you just don't care if you're here or not. So you decide to test it. You stand up. You feel your legs. You see the whole world bend down around you. Either the universe is moving or you. And humbly you go with the latter, for it falls in step with the sound of your sighs as you shift your way home.

Home… …Are you really going home this early? What about the things you wanted to get done? The places you wanted to go? The people you wanted to talk to? There was time to do all that, and you had the time, and you used up the time---but none of it happened. Was it because you willed it? Did you want this? Do you still want this? Is it not even in your control?

Concentrate. Even your hemispheres. Get the balance right. Get it together. Put it in perspective. You are who you are because you choose to be. But you choose to be what you choose to be everynight and it never gets you anywhere near to where you want to be that which you want to be---or so it comes full circle for you to ask if that which you want to be is truly that which you want to be or else that which you want or that which you think you want is not truly that which you want. There is everything to want, and nothing to want. Everything and everyone to satisfy, and no one. Those empty eyes. That lack of reflection. The legs that wander past you. The yipping little dog that doesn't yip for you. Like a bell without its toll or a church with closed doors before you and your shadows. Why are you here? You move and yet you are in quicksand. A deep river. Rapids that won't let you loose. A capsized boat….

You blink.

And you see them. In the park and in the grayness of the coming dark you feel them. Beyond the folds of your death bed as you come every waking second to softly join them you feel them. And there are worms in their eyes, just like you remember. And they smell like mud and dead kittens in burlap, just like you remember. And the flies circle their half-heads faster than your childish hands can grope for them as you're carried away—sobbing—in the hands of a native who dove in to save you from rescuing their corpses at the last second. It took two weeks of your youth to bottle up the hatred, fear, vomit, and tears for that revelation. Twelve years and three continents later—you are still trying to make sense of the scent of tragedy. That moldy mosquito smell of the Nile in heat, impregnated with the sorrows of everlasting fate.

She never had a spot on her. Even in granite, she was still the porcelain doll we once invited into your warm home. But she was warmer. Oh so warmer. A single touch of her thermal fingers—and it nearly chased away the cold paleness of your drowned parents skin as you once sobbed and sobbed and sobbed on the day that you knew, hoped, pleaded would be your last.

It wasn't. And here you are—twice as dead as they are. Watching the gray night cloud-dance its way over your head and you're suddenly, inevitably horrified to realize that you've gone through this very same routine four times a week for the last few months…the last year. The last age of your life ever since ever since ever since ever since… …

What are you kidding? It was just yesterday. Or it could very well have been. Or maybe not. Maybe you're dreaming. That's worth going home to test too, isn't it?

So you do. You 'go home'. One slow, uncertain foot at a time. And nobody sees you. And you predict it, know it, except it, and walk away from it.

With your hands in your pockets.

You reach headquarters. You walk the granite halls. Everyone is asleep. Everyone is dead. You remember their faces—you haven't been entirely blind to them these days. You know the concerned expressions that have been on them lately. The silent inquiries with the shifty eyes or eyemasks. Someone insisting that you should share whatever 'problems' you have. Someone wandering why you're so 'quiet' or 'out at night' a lot these days. The occasional, half-hearted 'I miss your jokes' or 'Wait, you're quitting tofu'?

The funniest thing is not so much to be you, but to wake up one morning and realize that you're you and you've grown up faster than the rest of them. But you haven't really grown up faster, and you know that. You're considerate enough to know that this whole world doesn't revolve around you. And yet, it's tied to you on blood vessels that wouldn't have the nerve of cutting loose. At least, not in this lifetime. You just want to find answers, and you're clinging onto the one childish hope that answers are things that come to you on angel wings without any provocation on your behalf. And you're also one to wait for the cows to come home.

You head to your room. Cyborg's room is open. His stereo system is stuck playing Depeche Mode and you want to kill him. But you make it and shut the door to the room. You toss off your jacket. Your shoes. A watch or wallet in between. You limp into your bathroom with the first belated yawn of the deathly night—

And you pause. Before the mirror, gazing at some teenager that's gazing back, you pause. The City. The people. The teens and the hobos and the romeos and the juliets and the eyes the eyes the eyes the eyes the eyes….

You run a hand across your cheek. Your ears. Your chest. And you have to admit. You have to admit that you're not any less green than you were since day one. There is no glory and there is no excuses. Not anymore. And in a split second, you are educated and confused at the same time.

"Dude… …Weak." Is all you have to say. Ever all you have to say.

In her eyes. In her face. Skin so porcelain, you could almost see your reflection. It was as pale as a ghost orgasmic enough to fly out of orbit with the simple scent of her in his ectoplasmic grasp…but…

"Weak…"

You limp off into the shower. Tonight you will sleep. Or maybe you won't.