Nights like tonight inspire bad habits. Give me gold plates piled high with cigarettes, to burn hours into ashes. Give me consecutive lone nights, scrawling on the mysteriously smeared pages of notebooks as I pull long draughts from a bottle of single-malt whiskey at my desk lit by a pyre of candles. Give me midnight cycles by the raging sea, salt on my cheeks and lips, panting further and further into darkness.

Instead there is white wine and Hasselhoff on the telly and my roommate cycling to videos of cells attacking or forming armies in slow motions. I want violence, a short life, bad men weeping with fear at the sound of my footsteps. I wait for these impulses to pass, to want again the sun, almond milk in my daily bowl of cereal, and 30-minute episodes of stationary cycling. This will pass. All things pass.

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