He tipped his head back, and gently formed a delicate “o” with the sultry rim of his mouth. The smoke bleeds from his muzzle, cracks, hiding the radiate from the neglected stars, consigned to oblivion. The fragile gunmetal wisps shatter the sky and all that is left is the frigid air and veiled heaven, if the night even allowed the existence of such. The constant flow of vapor paused for a moment, driving my pulse to a halt. His sapphire eyes unwilted, gouts of sharp ice. Existentially and prepossessingly of their own kind. He choked on bitterness of the air and held himself in a slumber of theory before he let his undernourished fingers regrasp the object in his hand. His ice black hair blended into the sky while his anemic sheet of complexion created friction amongst an emotionless night. Mocking the spirits of the world and wrecking havoc on psyche by an ever so simple glance. He had glanced at me four hundred and ninety seven times from that very moment, and counting.

I’m standing, hiding to be more exact, behind a dissipated, hapless, former restaurant. The time I had discovered him had been exactly seven hundred sixty three midnights ago from this very moment. It’s a pathetic story, really. But if you must know. Marcy’s, the antique edifice I’m currently soliciting on, was a fully functioning member of society slightly over two years ago. One night, around 12:03, I had been stumbling out of the employee exist. Somewhere lost amidst drowning in my ETOH of 0.9 and in a robust rage from my less than subpar companions. I bursted through the doors into an aphotic night like the present and tripped over a fractured sediment of concrete praying to be annexed back onto the building. After my face had gone plummeting at the ground, begging for it like a long lost sister, it smashed quite intensely against the pavement. I don’t recall much from that experience except a brief dour taste of fumes trying to seduce my lips into opening and a pair of glassy, gout, prepossessing blue eyes. His blithe regard for the world came plummeting at me like a bullet being shot through my chest. I get a similar feeling now every time I catch a glimpse of him.

All possible nights since, exactly six hundred and and seventy three midnights, I have gone back to that exact spot at precisely 12:03 and watched him inhale a mist of hazy chemicals and slowly lose his mind as he stares aimlessly into oblivion. While he leans up against Marcy’s and breaths in the hell in life I sit across the parking lot on a broken piece of cement, much like his, and safeguard.

There were so many things I had wondered. I hallucinated running my fingers over the gentle crick in his nose and chocking on the pollution that was eternally damned to be his breath. I wanted more than anything to ask him what his favorite color was? Did he have a younger sister? What is his all time favorite verse of prose, or did he not enjoy that type of thing? I was tormented over my lack of knowledge and how he slowly smoked his to bits. I wanted to know how he got here, and why he stayed. And why did I...?

One night I returned to our place behind the perishing Marcy’s and he wasn’t there. I sat down for exactly fifty six and a half seconds and then stood back up. I repeated that process forty four times while blinking my eyes about a thousand and twenty eight, pleading to myself that I was imagining that he was not there. Praying to God that it was my subconscious showing me a world that would be significantly healthier for me but still playing a cruel joke because actually he was right there in front of me, but he wasn’t.

I returned to Marcy’s every night for nineteen more days. And still nothing. Absolutely nothing. He was gone.

At night six hundred and ninety two I brought a small pearl cross and rested it next to a cigarette and the place he used to sit. I thought it was mildly ironic. Heaven laughed at his very existence and goodness was singed by the very breath he breathed. But at the same time, all I wanted to give him, was a memory. I laid down at the very spot he used to sit, and make eye contact with me four hundred and ninety nine times before. Slowly my eyes closed and his memory hide in the crevices of my mind.

I started at his jawline. My fingers traced every hollow, every indent they could find. His face as smooth as the ice in hell. My index finger alone trailed down his neck and paused at his skeletal collarbone. All of a sudden I felt fire. An intense passion blew threw me like nothing I had ever felt before. It was enthralling. I pressed myself closer to him awaiting his reaction. The fire was getting more and more intense, I could feel his breath caressing my cheek, torches were flying through the sky. I went to press my lips against his, after all this time of wondering. And then he was gone. I carefully opened my eyes to find my body laying and my head resting on that cement block.

Once my vision slowly started to return to me, the burning sensation returned as well. I looked up to see the Marcy’s was on fire, and conveniently, as was I. I didn’t move for a moment because I honestly wasn’t sure whether or not it was worth the bother. Unfortunately, the tinging of the fire got irritating enough where I couldn’t take it any longer. I found an old water bottle in reach and dumped that on me and then rolled to the side to put out the rest of whatever the hell else was on me. Close enough.

I sat there on that same piece of cement and watched Marcy’s burn down to the ground. The embers ignited the sky and unleashed a battle ripping apart the flesh of the stars. Chunks of concrete melted into limbo and dripped into the stairway to hell. Heaven looked down and laughed at my whore of a sacred building waning into it’s final breath. My singed hand dug into the small fraction of a pocket I still had left and gently stroked the top of my cell phone. It only took three buttons, my moral self tried to pursued me. I laughed for an instant at the absurdity of the idea and instead lied down on my ever so familiar fragment of concrete and watched the building seize to exist.

I woke up one final time and the fire had been put out. The once aquamarine electronic sign for Marcy’s was twitching and sparks were popping out of it. I rubbed my eyes and slowly removed myself from the ground. Tiny bits of rubble covered my face and black soot was all over my clothes. A small part of the building where he used to sit still had a little bit of fire burning next to it. I picked up a cigarette from the ground and ignited it by the fire. Where did you go? I cried to myself and I slowly took my first drag.

I let the fiberglass pieces tear my skin and sanction the high to flow in. The nostalgic inebriation burns my lips like brail as I dare to desire another puff. I close my eyes and let the smoke intoxicate me, asphyxiated not by the poisoned ether but by the fact that he was gone. I tipped my head back, and gently formed a delicate “o”, recalling the sultry rim of his mouth. Two existentially and prepossessingly blue eyes assail my mind and amalgamate my psyche. I wrap my hand around his seared, pearl cross, and hold for a moment to let the smoke bleed out of my nostrils. Goodbye, my Marcy boy...