Night Town- We Are But Shadows

 

It’s been far too long since I came back here. G--- J changed their name to Jazzy J, and sometimes their inners call them Jazzy They. Since they’re not really sure whether they actually have Roma ancestry. Are they still playing music? I miss the sound of their violin. Drifted away. Sibling, when will we make music together again? Will we ever put our hands together and make spells?

“Maybe I’ll see you on the dancefloor later..” a friend says. I smile quietly. Maybe I will sway without thinking about it. It feels drunken out there. We swim in a Piscean sea. Are we happy? It doesn’t matter. I hitch up my boxers clandestinely and wipe a fleck of eyeshadow from near my tear duct.

I look deep into our faces. Some of us look the same, or have aged in reverse. Under deep layers of makeup, our beauty and handsomeness floats, buoyed. But many of us have aged. The skin crackles and bows to gravity, to change and unspoken trauma. We stretched. We contracted. We gained weight. We lost weight. We facelifted ourselves up by our bootstraps. I judge us. I judge myself. We are all some form of addict. Contracting and expanding like universes.

I glance at the chair occupied by the person with my former job. I left my post reading the cards so that the doer of that job could become someone more melanated. But I have failed to see it lately. It's just some woman ten years younger than I who looks like how I looked as a woman. People want the same thing, it seems.

Robots roam the boulevard now. Scanning us. Knowing that we’re replaceable. This is not exactly what we meant when we said “Defund the police,” but sure, things are open to interpretation. You never know what fancies the future will generate.

**

Time to wander home.

At this hour, the street names tributary together. I know they are stories of ghosts. I can feel the ghosts who want to come home with me every time I walk on the boulevard. Sometimes even through side streets. This place is more and more sanitary every day and we hate it. It is the Vegas strip. It’s the place where tourists want to gawk at us.

A woman(?, I’ve barely ever seen her from the front but that doesn’t matter) sways against the side of the building. Cropped vest and cutoff shorts. I’ve nicknamed her Tequila in my head. I hope that her stupor’ed haze has taken her somewhere warm and interesting. She reminds me that I mean to carry Narcan but never do. A beer can clinks.

I gaze at the church that dead-ends the street, a bizarre sight in this place oft-nicknamed Babalon. I barely remember its image because I’ve looked at it sober so few times, and I swear it looks different. A hardwall buts up to protect a tent-sleeper. On it, spray-painted reads: “We are but shadows.” Then under it, on a smaller cardboard sign: “See us.”