The men stare intently at me with vacant eyes the blue-green of glacial lakes.

She was looking right at me sort of dreamily, happily, like what bliss, what fun, isn’t it?

She smells like wet leaf, firewood, and green tea. Her hair is platinum feathers brushing my cheeks. Her eyes are runny and scary with makeup, both the brown one and the blue one boring into my skull. We’re swaying slightly like we’re about to dance.

She looks down the street as though she’s waiting for a taxi that will arrive and whisk her away any minute now. The street is dark, empty, aside from a few scared-looking undergrads walking quickly down the sidewalk, huddled together, their coiffed heads bent, purse logos shimmering in the dark.

she’s staring up at the moon, smiling serenely at it like the moon is her new best friend, it’s telling her the most gorgeous things in the world,

She blows smoke coolly out of her nostrils like a dragon.

Everything in that other life was stretched and gleaming and perfumed. Each room had a temperature I could control with the turn of a little dial. I should have felt like God. Instead I forgot that I had ever been poor. It grew so normal so quickly, that life. In my memory of this time, I sit looking bored out the window onto the most beautiful,

got lost in the mirror maze I was too tall for

clouding up the glass with his breath, staring at me or not, I never keep the curtains open long enough to find out.