I’ve misplaced my feet; somewhere in the fog of dope smoke and white lines and tight shoes and forever dancing, they wandered off. Probably I should go, the best place would be home and the next best thing would be upstairs to my room, but neither has the music and neither has the void. The worst is when you realize the music throbbing in your ears is residual, an echo left from records that have long since been packed into a van and driven off, across a bridge or to a downtown garage. It’s usually the heavy snap of the house lights coming on, the resigned, sober sigh of the bouncer saying, Come on everyone let’s go party’s over.

Then you see it’s only you and the scattered handful of remaining ghouls, sunken cheeked and numb toed, blinking at each other with rheumy eyes and self-loathing smirks. We’ll drift like seeds on a prairie wind.

I find myself in a filthy bathroom stall at some all-night diner. My companion is a greasy pair of hands attached to a blazer with a set of Porche keys in the pocket. In my compact’s mirror, there is lipstick on my teeth.