Neon foliage cutting between electric vines, trees stripped down to their spines standing quiet and still, trails inlaid with aromas, sparks, spectres of sound from somewhere thumping, trembling, fragrant smoke in the evaporation of fruits, errant desire inflecting off reality, needy flesh writhing, waning, reeling in the revelry—a concrete jungle spanning the length of a single street, endless shadowed windows stretched long and through, soft lanterns, hazy orange when body heat mixes with stars, the outline of titans static and far away, superimposed against the unnecessary horizon because somewhere, somewhen along the way, the sun became science and understood.

When the night feels this alive, it’s as though the dead will straighten and stretch their arms over their head, crack the muscles in their neck and pivot gently at the waist, newly invigorated by the souls in the sky, the mistakes in the wind. Because the deadliest drug in the world is fantasy. Because the moth does not hunt for the flame. Because magic distills atmosphere into nascent eruptions that boil thick on the surface, movements in the air surround and thus includes, because things that happen, move on their own, must involve things already happening.

When I first met you drinking in those dim yellows of a back-lit bar, you called out to me, a stranger—I like your jacket—and I thumbed the frayed hem of my pathetic inheritance as I drew closer to the muted fuchsia of your dress, the burnt silks of your hair. You looked at me, really looked at me, offered me a drink—it’s a cosmo, sorry not sorry—with an extra shot of vodka that rocketed up my sinuses, down to my stomach, sensation flickering like still-warm embers when you reached inside a dainty purse, pulled out a pack of cigarettes. You asked me if I wanted one and smiled wide when I said yes—nobody wants a smoke these days—and we went out to the street, back to the vivid fantasy, and you offered me a ruby lighter, novelty, studded with the glint of the false precious, preference, reflecting bright in the artificial when you closed your eyes with the inhale, dragged it back out past your lips.

This is what I think of when I think of you, the way you faded into the colors of darkness as your silhouette melted long and through, beyond the glow and fuzz, glitz and glam, past the point when the road flows into the blue-black of a river, when the carrions of light recede into the definitions of shadows. Because somewhere, somewhen along the way, we grew apart and understood.

Gina Kong is currently an undergraduate student majoring in Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities (focus on Afro-Asian Studies), and minoring in writing at Washington University in St. Louis.