I stood beneath a sky so dark it broke against my bones in waves of midnight flowers. The air pressed against my skin as a low rumble of thunder rolled across the wasteland of my heart. Inside of the storm was the lifeless beating of a broken heart.

In the distance a vacancy sign flickered to life.

It burned neon in the heavy darkness.

My feet thundered against the dirt shoulder of the lonely highway, echoing in the vast chamber of night beneath the beckoning storm.

Vacancy.

I was alone.

I wandered like a forgotten thing towards the sign. In the depths of the night the grey shapes of an abandoned motel burned in my mind, long since faded from desert pastel. Broken glass crunched beneath my shoes as I walked past gutted windows.

I wandered across soft dust, silent as my shadow cast by burning neon letters. It echoed in my chest, a hollow tolling, a gentle and forgotten silence. In the pressing quiet I could feel the absent wind against my dusty skin.

My shattered flesh craved the cool hush of a whisper in the desert.

A door was left ajar for me, gutted and dark, just beyond the light of the vacancy sign.

I entered the shadow like a wraith, stepping up towards the door. The room number hung upside-down beside the broken of the frame. I ran a finger down the cool metal as a yearning wind rolled like a tumbleweed across the wasted land.

A buzz accompanied a flickering from behind me. I paused with one foot deep within the total darkness of the motel room. My lost eyes looked behind me at the flickering light. The No sign had hummed to life beside Vacancy, bathing the abandoned place in eerie green.

I pushed my way inside.

She waited for me, sitting on a cracked staircase, her velvet hair resting against the balustrade. Her stare was empty and yet so very hungry. It fed on the broken pieces of my flesh, drawing my in.

A forgotten light tinted the inside of the room the green of lonely dreams and abandoned places. My limbs moved slowly and my head rolled in confusion as if I were in a nightmare. I walked through air as thick as water towards her.

Her shape blurred and shuddered as she stood, moving like the ghosts of all those come before down the staircase. She passed within a foot of me, twisting the air with the scent of burning, the taste of lips long since stale.

She moved as if she were a part of me, one step ahead. I followed her, slow and rolling, through broken rooms and lost memories. I struggled to keep up, but further and further she fled into the darkness.

Each room was more broken than the last, each step ached from deep in the past.

She slipped behind a doorway like a lover whom had long since forgotten me, like a memory that had already disappeared. She left me broken and bleeding in this abandoned motel, bathed in the green of envious thoughts.

I was alone, truly alone, there were no vacancies left within me, there was nothing there at all.

I followed her through the doorway, but the room had long since gone dark.

My feet slipped on the cracked tiles and I slowly turned around, taking in the room; the broken bathtub from an old lover’s apartment, the leaky sink from a hostel, the window from which I had watched the jungle wake.

Shaking, I stepped in front of the shattered mirror and stared at the hollow thing within, empty of memories.

In this motel bathroom, I dropped to my knees and let out the sob that had been knotted beneath my heart for a long, long time.