We can’t go back to our apartments because if we do that, then we must confront the ghost of the before-times: the closet of clothes we no longer wear except for the button-downs we pair with running shorts during Zoom meetings and the blooming calendar of canceled events that remind us of our crumbled resolutions. It is March. We planned to move to a bigger place in a better part of town, but we are here. We sit on what the woman in the leasing office calls “the patio,” watching the city of sin swallow silence. We with our Bic lighters and our glowing embers. Steve with his plastic Coca-Cola cup filled with what he says is water.

We can’t go back to our apartments because then we will have to admit we don’t love our spouses anymore, can’t stand looking at our kids, hate the taste of our own cooking, are tired of being enraged at the poor wifi signal while jacking off in the only bathroom. It is August. Fremont Street has died. We are the funeral party, situated near the trash chute, still gambling. Uncertainty coils in our intestines like long-sleeved shirts in the coin-washing machine down the hall. Our lungs expand as we suck in smoke, and our thighs stick to milk carts and borrowed chairs. Steve is always thirsty, and he never has ice.

We can’t go back to our apartments because the plants are dead, our relatives are dead, the world is dead, and we are somehow alive, encased in mushroom cloud-shaped smoke. It is now November. We tape poems to our neighbors’ doors; tell war stories with stolen valor, masks dangling from our ears; and post onto our high school girlfriends’ Facebook walls because messaging directly feels like a wager. We are so late on rent that the constable visits. The paramedics are always outside the building, sirens flickering like cheap Christmas lights. The woman in the leasing office never gets rid of the roaches but somehow has room for more accent tables. We watch Steve’s empty hands shake. Our bodies quake in dry wind, dry mouthed. Fall approaches like a carjacker. We no longer wear button-downs on Zoom, and our 300-square-foot apartments are always occupied with voices or silence, never satiating. We are pulled to the “patio” because patio people are always thirsty.