Tomdai, Neon Lights

*beginning excerpt* *new story* *new to this app*

She was alone, and he was gone again. She sat on an abandoned playground swing from the Before-Times and smoked a cigarette. Smoking cigarettes was highly looked down on nowadays, but Alaina didn’t care anymore. Even this was representative of a small token to get her personal freedom back.

Alaina watched the smoke take off into the night and disappear.

It’s nice to not watch the light catch the smoke, she thought to herself in the silence. After all, the city is covered in lights and cameras.

The silence was so abundantly full of sound for her, only hearing a distant old train run in the distance rushing somewhere.

Swing goes forward, swing goes back. Breathe.

And Dain was gone.

Love doesn’t exist anymore, does it?

I’m sure it must have at one point… there were so many stories written about it.

Yet here I am… hurt. Maybe it really was a hormonal sickness.

Alaina spun in the swing’s chains, staring up at the blanketed sky. You couldn’t view the stars from the city. Just reflected light pollution. Tomdai City made a dome to view the sky, but it was nice escaping to see the real thing every so often.

A nice reminder of where we came from. Or what we destroyed as humanity collectively…

Alaina made sure to put her cigarette butt into her pocket once it was out.

You’ve been through enough, Earth… she said with a wry smile and started apathetically heading back towards her Square in Tomdai.

She pressed a couple of buttons on her Satellite Lenz glasses frames, put on some white noise, and followed the augmented overlay map to get home.

Dain is gone… I wonder if none of it was real for him. Maybe, I’m the sick one… for believing in anything other than what we can all see.

Alaina hadn’t seen love. She’d seen businesspeople and rushing trains.

Then again, valuing intelligence is still better than the historical references of people obsessed about appearances… *shudders.*

Dain probably would’ve agreed.

She was putting the narrow key pin into her door now. Wow, how long did I space out while I was walking? Alaina barely recalled all the old tree roots, dirt, and entrance back through Tomdai’s Sphere’s gate.

Alaina stared at her doorknob, stared at the key pin. She wanted to just throw it away. Throw it off the 6th-floor balcony down into the city and sit outside her door.

Anything to break going in there alone again. Anything to break the cycle of going back to a factory line the next day. Would that change her life? Probably for the worse, she reasoned.

I will feel what I want, she told herself as she turned the doorknob to go inside.

But… It hurt this time. She had felt what she wanted, with Dain. What you wanted was imaginary, just like the books you read, Alaina.

Everything was cast in monochrome. She amazed herself she could see any colors in this world, even in the bright neon lights of the city.