Neon Requiem

 

Neon Requiem

He drove the long black road with the top peeled back,
desert wind slicing through the last of his lines.
Scripts scattered like losing tickets in the back seat,
a man who had already written his own ending.
Vegas rose up—cheap gold and bleeding pink—
calling him home to the bottle’s final amen.
He came to disappear.
Not slowly, not sweetly,
but in one long, deliberate swallow of night.
Whiskey became his rosary,
each shot a bead clicked off the string of days
until the string itself dissolved.
Then she stepped into the neon’s cheap halo—
Sera, lipstick the color of stop signs,
eyes older than the city itself.
She sold her body the way he sold his soul:
no haggling, no shame, just the transaction
of two people who had run out of reasons to lie.
They made their pact over lukewarm coffee and smoke:
I will not save you.
You will not save me.
We will only keep each other warm
until the cold wins.
So they did.
He bought her eggs and orange juice like a promise.
She held his shaking hands when the DTs came roaring.
They laughed in the dark motel room
while the slot machines downstairs sang their mechanical hymns.
For a handful of nights they were almost holy—
two beautiful ruins leaning on each other
so neither one had to fall alone.
But the bottle never negotiates.
It took him piece by piece,
until even her soft voice couldn’t reach the man
still drowning inside the man she loved. 
One bruised dawn he curled into her like a child,
skin clammy, breath ragged, eyes already somewhere else.
She stroked his hair and whispered the only truth left:
“Go on, baby. I won’t stop you.” 
And he left Las Vegas the way he arrived—
quietly, completely,
a ghost slipping out the back door of his own life
while the city kept glittering behind him,
indifferent, eternal,
still taking bets on the next lost soul
who thinks the lights will let him stay.