The city never sleeps, but tonight it feels like it wants me dead.

It is too loud. Every honk, every shout, every slam of a car door, ricochets inside my skull like broken glass. My body trembles with each step I force onto the cracked pavement of the Upper West Side. I don’t know where I’m going. I just know I can’t stop. Instinct tells me if I stop, I won’t get back up again.

My throat burns. My vision tilts and swims, lights smearing into streaks of color. My arm throbs. I look down, squinting at the faint glint of metal under the streetlight. A syringe dangles grotesquely from the inside of my elbow,
half-buried in bruised flesh. The sight jolts something inside me—horror,
shame, rage—but my fingers are too heavy, too clumsy to pull it out.

People glance at me as I pass—some with disgust, others with pity. Most don’t care at all.

I want to scream at them: This isn’t me. I didn’t choose this. But my mouth is dry, my tongue heavy. Nothing comes out but a ragged rasp.

I try to make sense of the thing stuck in my arm, sharp, humming, wrong. How it got there, why I can’t pull it free—but my thoughts won’t hold still. They slip
through my grasp like quicksand. Every time I catch the edge of a memory, it
thickens, turns syrupy, and drags me down deeper into confusion. The harder I fight to hold on, the faster I sink.

My knees buckle.

I hit the pavement with a sickening thud, pain bursting through my ribs and head. Sharp enough to briefly clear the fog. Above me, the moon stares down, pale and unblinking. Its light drowned out by the city's glow.

Cold concrete presses against my cheek, as the thought slides in: Maybe
this is it. Maybe tonight I will finally stop fighting.

I want to laugh. My last sight on this earth might be that cold, silver eye looking down at me, indifferent to my end. And strangely, that feels better than dying where I’d been. Better than those walls. Better than their hands.

Then a child’s voice cuts through the fog.

“Mom! Mom, look—there’s someone—”

Footsteps rush closer, then halt. A sharp intake of breath.

“Don’t look, honey,” a woman says quickly. “Stay back.”

More footsteps. More voices. Snatches of judgment float down like knives.

“She’s high out of her mind.”

“Another junkie.”

“Don’t touch her—you’ll catch something.”

Shame burns hotter than the fever in my veins. If only it were that simple. If only I had chosen this needle, this street. I know I didn’t, but how did I get here?