It’s so hard to see the stars in this part of the city. Everything in this candy coated part of town screams with color, refusing to stop unless something breaks.

The blues and pinks of the brightly lit signs, the flickering screens of nearby electronics shops overburdened with a cornucopia of bulky gadgets and gizmos for any tinkerer to delve into, and blinking strobe lights from a nearby club accompanied by synthesizers that create a pure wall of sound that anyone who wishes to join in the revelry must penetrate by sheer force of will. The slick angular cars glide down a busy street, their headlights merely a drop in the ocean of lights, sights, and sounds. It makes the stars seem quaint in comparison.

Yet I truly enjoy the stars. They are the jewelry that Madame Void wears every night, a galactic bauble that accentuates her beauty. However in this part of the city, the sky is black, polluted by the light that man has created in order to usurp that beauty, take it for their own.

There are nights that I do spirit away from the city, just to look at the stars, marvel at them and enjoy their presence. It’s a strange thing to some people, I know, but in a strange way I revel in this madness. I enjoy the stars, and if that’s wrong I don’t want to be right.

“Hey kid.” I snap out of my trance and notice a woman standing next to me. She was wearing some gaudy outfit of light pinks and oranges twisted in strange angular shapes that ran over her body the same way a car runs over a wild animal. “You alright, you’ve been staring at the sky for a while” she says, taking a drag from a cigarette in her hand. “Yeah, it’s nothing, really” I say dismissively. Smoke pours out of her mouth like a dragon. “Ok” she says with hesitation, “just be careful, people will start thinking your some kind of crazy person, staring straight up at the sky like that.” The woman goes to walk past, heading towards a crosswalk nearby. Probably going to the club I imagine.

I begin heading down the street, originally I was heading somewhere but I got caught up in staring at the sky. The woman was right, that is kind of strange when you think about it. But again, I accept it. Originally I was heading to an arcade in this part of the city. I was supposed to meet a friend there by the name of Sam. He’s a good guy, but I always felt there was some kind of disconnect between me and him. If anything he reflects his environment I feel. He’s loud, boisterous, not afraid to talk, a brightness that matches the neon reflections that this city holds. Sam is a good man though, and despite his booming personality, he makes good company.

If there is one constant in the streets of this city, it’s the pavement. The pavement, no matter what part of the city you’re in, is always a same dark grey, like the color of freshly mined iron. No matter where the colors of the buildings and signs in its flashy manner, flooding into cars or windows, the pavement is always grey. Admittedly I spend more time looking towards the pavement then any of the other things you’d find walking in the city. I find a strange solace in the greyness, a constant in the crowd of changing faces, of blinding light, and who knows what else. This also, compared to other people, makes it seem as though my walks through the city are quite boring.

The trip to the arcade was, in relative terms, uneventful. I look up at the sign and in large thin italicized letters read The Multiverse Arcade. When I was younger I used to visit here every day after school to blow what was left of my lunch money on the arcade machines. Though it has fallen into trappings of other parts of the city, the sign itself being a mess of color with neon tubing running along every which way like a disaster struck the sign and the tubes needed to run for cover.

However the nostalgia I felt for the building of quarter eating machines still stuck with me, and I felt almost compelled to enter it once again. For good memories always have a way of sticking with a person, no matter how trivial or childish it could be in retrospect. I knew of people that still collected things from a show involving amphibians that knew Kung Fu and they seemed perfectly content with that. Though again, I am not one to judge.