×
vyle. wakes up to the sharp slice of morning light cutting through the blinds,
breaking across the room in golden slats.
His phone, as always, is already in his hand—a lifeline to the night before,
with half‐lit club shots from Clayton Hauck (or Bronques from Lastnightsparty, from the party with Uffie at Sonotheque),
faces blurred by movement, and a club soaked in post-modern, early 2000's haze.
He scrolls, trying to stitch the fragments together,
trying to remember the rhythm of the night that led him here,
amid navigating his mother's issues with things around the house.
Then the message.
The one that stops the morning in its tracks.
A family friend, their words clipped, hurried, weighted with something inevitable.
His mother—a routine checkup turned catastrophe,
the quiet undertow of life suddenly roaring into something unmanageable—ICU.
Uncertain, but also certain.
A point of no return.
He leaves, steps out of the building's underground,
the concrete still cool from last night,
the scent of damp pavement rising with the heat.
The woman beside him—last night's blurred companion—moves with him,
but something about her is wrong.
It dawns on him like a slow sunrise over a distant highway:
she's not who she says she is.
Or maybe she never said anything at all.
Maybe he just assumed.
The morning air feels heavier now,
thick with the weight of recognition,
with the sense that something—everything—is shifting.
The city hums, indifferent, swallowing him whole.
And vyle. doesn't know exactly where he's going,
only that he has to move.
The road ahead is uncertain, unmarked,
but one thing is clear—he has to find his way before the past catches up,
before the present slips entirely from his grasp.
