Let us descend into the blind world is scratched onto the bathroom wall in neat, black cursive. It is late, or early, and the cocaine someone gave you earlier has started to wear off and you are slowly aching. A dark shadow quickly passes and you turn but there is nothing there and your skin is covered in bumps and you have the urge to throw up.

Outside of the club seems colder than what it is. You look over at her and she has faint black lines down her cheeks where mascara tears have run. You think to yourself that you should say something. You think to yourself of all the somethings you should say and forget to say anything. Say nothing.

The restaurant is cheap, run-down and empty and when you arrive you instantly feel that it is all a terrible mistake. You can see her through the glass and she is staring out into space with a confidence that makes you envious.

The waitress, a fat middle-aged woman with bad skin and an unfortunate face has her hair tied back clumsily and the laces of the runners she is wearing are noticeably stiff, as though they have never been untied. When you tell her that you are with the girl in the back booth, she simply stares. Empty, expressionless, the dark hair falling down into the eyes, a mess of broken poetry.

It’s a yes or no question. Like charades.

Seconds pass like lifetimes and everything slowly blurs, morphs into some hazy static that suddenly seems irrelevant and meaningless, as if the universe has contracted into something smaller and you have transcended.

When the No falls from your mouth it is atomic and unnoticed. Something sad touches your spine, a dull blade enters with a pain that you can’t exactly feel. You are suddenly very aware of your ribs, of how they hold your chest, and of how they suddenly seem lonely. You wonder what bone marrow tastes like, whether the world was a better place before they shot Lennon, and why people don’t admit that they piss in pools. How much blood can you drink before you get sick and why aren’t all girls French and why can’t food be a pill that you take each morning.

At some point you say goodbye and leave, but you don’t remember paying and you don’t remember the road. You reflect on the stretching asphalt, an electric maze connecting the suburbs of void. The city suddenly appears to be empty and desolate and greasy and depressing. The cobble-stoned streets swarm with fruit flies and killers seeking spare change in gutters. You reflect on poverty, on crime, on the body of the boy you knew in high school, quietly decomposing in the dirt under the white roses and it comes upon you, as if for the first time, that you are utterly alone.

The dark reverie rings with something sad and yet strangely beautiful. You have arrived at the bottom of the ocean and wonder why you ever cared to swim.