Neon Lights

"Why do they even care to ask me everytime. They know I would never go. Maybe they do enjoy my misery. They are one stubborn herd of pretentious people. Bastards..all of them!"

Every last soul had abandoned the office floor. The building stood in the middle of the business hub, amidst the innumerable slick restaurants and bars. The refulgent neon signs on the distant skyline crowned the vivacious young city hangouts that swarmed underneath. Like so many previous nights, she switched off all lights in her vicinity, fixed herself a cappuccino and laid back in her chair and stared at those lights. She jokingly called it a Friday ritual to herself. It had to be a joke!

Even while sitting there, she could see Megan and Abigail enticingly kiss the air as they sashayed on Swanston Street across the Arthur's Lounge. Their carelessness was infectious and they knew how to flaunt it. They seemed so far away from anything that could be called worrisome as if they always had a cushion of air underneath to walk upon. How she wanted to look down upon them as shallow, mindless damsels and dismiss their existence as frivolous. How she wanted to seal their mouths with a packing tape and dump them in a box labelled 'bitches'. But deep down she knew she would give up everything she had known, just to be them.

She had not looked at herself in the mirror since the last 4 years. In the evenings, while taking shower, she would slide open the bathroom door to let the faint lobby bulb sneak through that tiny inch, just enough for her to make out her soap and shampoo. The bathroom mirror still existed to avoid those rare guests getting judgmental of her timid demeanour. After the shower, she would walk into the kitchen, to pick the scratchy steel pan and would look at her inscrutable reflection to straighten her hair. She would pull up the blinds, put on Carpenters, light up a cigarette and would lay against the fluffy cushion on the carpet and look at the shimmering lights of the distant crawling city traffic.

She would lay there for hours feeling the touch of her skin under her palms. She loved that dainty touch and the paleness of her skin under the faint light in the lobby. She would feel her long slender neck and fine shoulder bone with her fingers. Her fingers would freeze right there as she would often feel a lump form in her throat. It would just grow bigger even though she would clench her jaws. The water in the eyes would just swell and trickle down her cheeks. Sometimes, you can never cry enough. She would just collapse on the carpet, bare, sobbing, retreating into a fidgety slumber.

It was well past ten when she pulled her eyes away from those neon lights. She was nauseated at the thought of the two days that lay ahead. The confines of her sundrenched glass-walled apartment, with nowhere to go, to cook for herself, flipping through those same old sick channels, and rubbing those 4 dozen cigarette stubs in the tortoise ash tray. She picked up her handbag and dragged herself out of the office exit on Lonsdale Street. The night was sizzling. Large groups of boys and girls laughing mischievously and screaming their heart out on the pavements as they made their way to the pubs and restaurants. She walked quickly with her head down. It was a twenty minute walk to the South Bank. She managed to find a secluded spot besides the river where she slumped, eased herself out of her shoes, lit a cigarette and put her feet in the water.

It would have been about an hour when she looked up and saw a fleet of sea gulls circle around the observation deck atop 80th floor of Rialto. They looked like fire flies in the violet beams emerging from the rooftop, ascending to the heavens, pushing away the air currents and forming a halo around the tall iron post. It was time, she finally told herself. She had to be somewhere else. She rubbed the cigarette butt against the concrete, stared at the casino lights in the water for one last time. Taking a deep breath, she slid off the concrete step into the gray calm of the river. The water could not make her chilly today. It rose up towards her chin and immersed her fine shoulder bone, her slender neck....... and her charred face. She had always obhored the prickly touch of water against the burnt skin. She was relieved that it would be the last time.......