You know this road. Every streetlight familiar, every bend memorized by years of coming back. You said this was the last time — swore it to yourself somewhere on the interstate, windows down, radio up. And yet here you are again, turning down the same avenue, your chest doing that thing it always does when the city haze opens up and you catch a glimpse of what you left behind. Some gravity has no name. Some returns don't need a reason. The night rolls in and pulls you like a tide, and you let it, because fighting it was never really something you were good at. Back again. Back again. The echo of someone you once were, calling from an open window.

The call comes late — always late — your voice still carrying sleep when you answer. Their face breaks through the screen and then fractures, pixel by pixel, the signal clawing to hold itself together. You speak into the silence that follows because silence in this context is unbearable. You call again. Dial tone. You check your phone until the screen dims and leaves you staring at your own reflection in the black glass. Some connections don't break dramatically. They don't end with a door slam or a final word. They fade — a long, slow static where warmth used to live — until one day you realize you're listening to nothing but the ghost of a frequency, and you've been doing it for months.

She walks in like the room was waiting for her. Leather boots. That particular kind of smile that only exists in neon-lit rooms at certain hours of the night. You don't know her name and it doesn't matter — the city bows, the crowd parts, and suddenly the two of you are running through it all together. Speakers shaking, volume punishing, the radio screaming as you take off with no destination in mind. You kiss beneath a neon sign that smells of rain and smoke. You dance like you'd forgotten your own name. Some nights aren't meant to last. Some nights are meant to be burned through — lived so hard and fast that they collapse into something incandescent. You survived it. Barely. But god, what a way to go.

Long after the night should have ended, you're still here. The music has slowed from a pulse to a heartbeat and the floor has thinned to just the ones who weren't ready to let go. She leans in the doorway with her smile like a loaded gun. Her hands find your collar and the room disappears into something warm and low-lit and close. There is a language in the bass that doesn't need words — only movement, only proximity, only the way a beat at 120 makes two bodies agree with each other in ways they haven't figured out how to say aloud. This is velvet overtime. The hour that doesn't belong to anyone. The crossing of some invisible line you knew you were approaching and walked toward anyway.

The fire on the beach throws everything into silhouette — the canyon, the coastline, the golden shape of her standing against it all with the stars wheeling overhead. You are drunk on Sunset Boulevard in your chest, even though you haven't moved. The city of angels performs its particular liturgy: helicopters circling moonward, canyon wind carrying smoke, the feeling that this exact moment is one of the last truly mythic ones. You know tomorrow will pull you back into ordinary time. You know this dream is finite. But right now the Pacific swallows the horizon and the stars dance around like gods and you let yourself believe, just for tonight, that some version of this never ends.

You can see everything. You can see the love — it's right there, visible, real, undeniable — but something invisible keeps you from reaching it. You speak in signals. You talk in static. She smiles like everything is the same and you watch from behind the glass of whatever this is, going slowly insane at the distance between two people standing in the same room. You're satellites, synchronized in orbit but never crossing paths, each pulling the other with enough gravity to ache but never enough to close the gap. You'd shatter stars to reach her. You'd silence the sun. But the glass holds and the silence grows and some mornings you wonder if you're a ghost she chose not to see — or just the echo of a memory she's learning to forget.

The city is always recording. Reel to reel, frame by frame, every hustler and heartbreak, every midnight confession and 3am bad decision pressed into the concrete like a negative. You ride through it with the windows down, a camera in your chest, watching the midnight heroes navigate their own small stories — the poet writing a nameless name in a parking lot, the couple arguing at a bus stop with more love than anger, the kid chasing something nobody else can see. This city speaks in a frequency only the lost can hear. You've been riding its streets long enough to know every siren as a kind of music. Every shadow a chapter. Every track a proof of passage.

The thing about being played is that somewhere in the middle of it, you knew. You saw the cards she was holding and you watched her deal them anyway, and some part of you sat back and let the hand play out because the game was too interesting to fold. She salted open wounds with that particular smile. Read the marquee — it said her name in lights, spelled out in obvious, blazing letters. And still you sat across the table. The will to fight never quite materialized. The sorrow never quite translated into exit. Then one day — clean and quick — she chose the one and grabbed and ran, and the room was just you and the cards and the sound of someone who should have known better learning that lesson again.

There was an empty street and a single streetlight and then there was her — and the world contracted to a single, electric second. Black lace. Something in the eyes that held the whole dark universe for a moment. She turned slow, as if aware of being watched by time itself, and you opened your mouth to say something that had no words yet. Then she was gone, and the concrete held nothing but its ordinary silence. You've been back to that corner. The same hour, the same light. There's nothing there. There was never anything there. But you keep going, because the glimpse you caught was so wholly, irreversibly real that the haunting feels like the most honest thing that's ever happened to you. Some encounters aren't meetings. They're proofs that something eternal briefly pressed through.

The pace is faster every day and you can feel the human parts of yourself losing ground to it. A thousand lives scroll behind your eyes, each one convincing, each one a new update to download. People don't look up anymore — not because they've stopped caring, but because the screen in the hand has become the primary face of the world. You miss the warmth of something unmediated. You miss silence that didn't need filling. You miss when truth could be found rather than constructed. There's a heartbeat in there somewhere, underneath the noise, but you have to go very quiet and very still to hear it, and the world doesn't pause long enough for quiet or still. You adapt. You align. You learn to live in the future tense and hope your heart can catch up.

This is what you carry with you — the last chapter of the world that was. Before the noise became total. Before every heartbeat was bought and traded. Before silence became something to fill and truth became something to construct. You remember a world where you got lost just to wander, where pictures lived inside your head instead of in a cloud, where every moment didn't need to be said to exist. Two people under a sky so thick with stars it felt like a cathedral. No feed. No filter. Just the weight of being present. Just you and someone you loved, open and unmediated, feeling every rise and fall with your whole body. You were human. You were completely, devastatingly human. And if there's a past worth restoring, it's not a place or a time — it's that feeling. The feeling of human before.