Abscissa

The city is a metaphor for the light that never goes out.

3am. Words flash in his head. Newspaper cutouts, sentences and phrases and words, in black over grey, blown at his face. It wraps the paleness of his naked body as smoke would wrap around air. Let it remind you of  random, beautiful, and fleeting things. He flicks the cigarette butt and watch it plummet, swaying, downwards. 24-hour convenience stores are crowned, once again, as the survivors of the night. Slowly, the orange haze hanging over the city dissipates, replaced by an empty, heavy scowl. Nothing could remind him of anything beautiful -- of anything -- at all. It's just him and the wind, and the rotting carcass of the metropolis.

Staring directly at him is a nineteen year old boy. A pool of contempt swirls beneath his eyes, shrouded by clusters of thick, wavy hair. He stares at the boy for a minute, a minute, a minute. There's something attractive yet suspicious about the boy. And then he saw, in a fragment of a second as he blinks for a hundredth time, a sneer that embodies dishonesty and trickery playing across his face, unsuspecting and calm. It had been there all along. It played side by side with his beauty.

6am. Pain became one with pleasure. The boy was inside him, thrusting deeper and deeper and deeper. The boy still wears that sneer, intensifying every minute. The pain reminds him of the smoke that tried to harness a ghostly wind. It goes away the harder you try to cling to it. 

In that moment, he was reminded of what he had always believed in -- that at the end of the day, the city will always remind him of how rotten he is.

How My Heart Behaves - Feist