I broke the rules. I strayed from the path.
Time doesn't stop for mavericks. Time marched on, regardless of the boy I thought I was.

As the sun set, dark drifted over the apartments like astral ash, like the dust of dusk. California stars are too regal to show their faces, and the night sky was blank, vacant and violet. As the street lighting embers clicked on like lighters in the hands of evening men, shadows became anchored and sewn to the walls and halls. Everywhere lay skewed shade, umbrage running across the separate apartment sections in angles that made doors where there were none and took entire walls away into the other realm that was the night, cutting pieces away from what was visible.