Adrian stumbled sleepily down the paved sidewalk, counting the number of steps each tile took to cross.

“Two and a quarter feet…” he thought. “Every tile of the sidewalk in this city is two and a quarter feet, by city regulation…”

Adrian was a chronic sufferer of insomnia, a genetic predisposition he’d inherited from his mother. Often, when he was a teenager, he would travel to the kitchen in the middle of the night when he took a break from a study session, only to find her sitting in the dark with only a small overhead lamp to illuminate her as she made a cup of tea. As he advanced through school, these meetings became less frequent; he found that the more he became acquainted with people, the less he liked being around them. Even the presence of his mother, with whom he shared a good relationship, was dreadful if he was in the wrong state of mind.

He was unsure if his misanthropic attitude had made him into an introvert, or if it was the other way around. He was unsure when and where most things began or ended. People slowly began to drop out of his life. Regardless, he spent less and less time outside; when the suburb he lived in was bustling with the activity of little ants, marching to and from the anthill to their deaths. In that respect, his insomnia could have been considered a blessing, because it inspired him to leave the house and walk the streets at night, when it was near empty.

“The world at night…” he ruminated, “is such a strange place…”

On this particular evening, a Wednesday, the street was dead quiet. Every three minutes or so, a car would pass by. The orange glow of the streetlights cast what little was visible in an uncanny hue.

“The world at night…”

His footsteps quietly echoed through the streets with a rhythmic pace. He took a left and Veissiere Park swung into his view. He hadn’t explored the park very much before, despite having lived in the area for around three years.

“I’d like to see what it feels like without so many people,” he thought. “When there’s only me…”

He crossed the street without feeling the need to look both ways, and proceeded up the hard concrete steps that connected the sidewalk to the paved paths of the park.

The park was quiet, dark, and utterly refreshing. There were rarely times when he bothered to go out into nature; the last time he tried, he ran into far too many people to be comfortable.

“Even when I’m in the middle of nature,” he stewed, “I can’t get away from people.”

There was one hiker or tourist for each ant on the ground.

The moonlight illuminated his path, casting the foliage of the park in a cold light. All about him, large oak trees extended upwards, bushes proliferated the grass, every now and again a squirrel would run past him. Veissiere Park was truly a sanction, surrounded on all sides by the street, by noise. Here, it was like the internal world he’d locked himself in and the external one he hid from were slowly able to meet.

Again and again, his feet hit the ground, the night air was cold and invigorating.

……...

A sound-

A presence-

To his right.

Adrian planted his right foot in the ground and pivoted his body, snapping into the direction of the presence.

Less than five feet away, there was a girl sitting on a bench, sitting up on her side, her legs curled up so that her feet just hung off the seat. She looked up at him with a strange expression, like she had been waiting to see if he would notice her.

For a moment, they stared into each other's eyes, dead space filled the air between them. If he hadn’t been so enraptured in the moment, Adrian may have noticed that for the first time, perhaps in his life, he felt that not speaking to someone was unbearable. But what to say? What could he possibly say to this girl? After all, they had just met, but not really met, they had just made eye-contact, and in any other situation in daily life, they would just look away from each other, but here-

“Hello?”

She had a small voice, but it seemed to float across the air with ease to his ears. If there was any amount of crowd buzz and chatter, she would never be heard, so it was ironic that her voice was best used in a time and place where nobody was around to hear it.

“Hello?” Adrian asked apprehensively.

“Would you… like to sit with me?” she responded.

The question had a kind of magnetic quality to it. Whatever he felt he needed to do, this was it, he was on a track. Adrian knew this for sure.

He walked over to the bench and took a seat across from her. Up close, he could make her out a little clearer. Something was odd about the way she dressed; in a long checkered coat that hung off the bench, a white dress shirt that fit too loosely, an equally loose red tie, and a short skirt that, by contrast clung tightly to her body. Her hair was unkempt and hung down to her waist, messily spilling over her face. She looked as if she hadn’t bought her own clothes or groomed herself in a long time. Her bangs refused to cover her eyes, though, the color of which was quite absorbing, in fact; so much so that he did not even notice that she didn’t have any pupils, merely bright blue dishes reflected in the moonlight.

Adrian noted her appearance, but was not put off by it at all. In her hand, she held a chocolate bar; a few small bites were taken out of it, less than a quarter.

“What’s that?” he asked. A stupid question, it was obvious to both of them, and it made much more sense to ask “what are you doing here?” or “what’s your name?” but at this moment, that was the only question that mattered.

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“A chocolate bar,” she said in the same small voice.

“What are you doing eating that here?” he followed up.

She looked away from him and sullenly gazed at her sleeves.

“I’m going to be dying soon.”

“W-what?” his shock was barely masked by a layer of etiquette.

She sighed and closed her eyes, her mouth wavered, as if she was about to cry. No tears came out. She suddenly opened her eyes again and looked up into the sky.

“It’s really quite nice out here, don’t you think?” she said softly.

“Yeah, I agree,” Adrian replied slowly. “That’s why I came out here, the world is a lot quieter at night.”

A moment of silence passed between them.

“Excuse me?” he asked, pensively.

“Yes?”

“You said- and… I’m sorry if this is too much- but you said that you would be… dying soon…” he began, her eyes stayed on him, though he couldn’t look at her. “And, well, I just wanted to know what was going on…?”

She sighed once more and looked down at her feet.

“I wasn’t born to live much longer than this,” she mumbled.

“Is it a disease?” he asked.

“It’s just death,” came the reply. “I mean, you don’t know how long you’re going to live, right? When your parent tells you that you’ll live into your nineties, you might get hit by a car that day. If a doctor tells you you have six months to live, you might live another twenty years, you might get hit by a car that day.

I figured that I might as well enjoy myself here a bit. I don’t go out very much, you know.”

By this time, her eyes had drifted from him upwards to the sky.

“I said earlier that the sky is really pretty, but the light pollution is blocking out most of the stars.”

Adrian thought about this for a moment.

“Well, most of those stars are dead anyway. It takes a really long time for the light to get here... Maybe when we can’t see the stars, it isn’t that they’re being blocked out, we’re just seeing what’s really there.

You know, eventually, all the galaxies are gonna spin away from ours, and the Earth is gonna be pretty lonely. If we wait long enough, that’s what the sky is gonna look like forever, everyone spins away from us…”

She laughed quietly, more like a chuckle that was kept inside her, to herself.

“I guess that’s one way to look at it,” she replied. “But I don’t know if that’s an optimist or a pessimist way.”

“It’s a realist way,” he retorted.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “There’s no realist way to look at the future. Maybe the galaxies will spin out form us, or maybe the whole universe will blink out of existence.

Maybe there’s a whole reality that’s in this chocolate bar,” she said, holding it up in her hand before taking a bite of it. “There, I just killed the whole reality- gone!”

Her mood had significantly picked up since they had begun talking, her eyes sparkled a little more.

“What’s with the chocolate?” he asked again, remembering that his question hadn’t been answered the first time.

“I told you, I’m dying soon,” she hummed. “I figured that as long as I’m dying soon, I might as well enjoy something.”

“Is it good?”

“Not really,” she answered. “It’s bitter chocolate, I don’t much care for it. I think most people would prefer milk chocolate, even if it’s further away from the actual thing.”

She paused.

“I can’t blame them, though, because I prefer milk chocolate too.”

“When do you think it’ll come?” he asked suddenly.

“Death?” she asked, rhetorically. “Oh, that should be as soon as I finish this chocolate.”

“What?!” his voice, though hushed in the night, rang with alarm.

“Yeah,” she affirmed. “There’s not much to enjoy after this is done.”

He could only think of how sad it was, that her life would end after eating a bar of bitter chocolate.

“Don’t you think that’s depressing? Are you sad about that, are you pretending to be unaffected?”

“That’s a real direct question.”

“Of course it is.”

She thought for a moment.

“Yeah, I do think it’s a little sad,” she started. “But, I mean, chocolate is made to be eaten, right? When you buy one, you pay people to make more. No matter how bitter some of them are, a lot of milk chocolate ones are made too, and people like those.”

“What about chocolate with nuts in it?”

“Nuts?!” It was her turn to be shocked. “Do you like chocolate with nuts in it??” she demanded to know.

“No, actually,” he clarified. “I actually have an aversion to them.”

“An allergy?”

“No, just a general distaste.”

She chuckled at his response. “Maybe when you finish a bar of nut chocolate, you’ll die too.”

“I’d probably dislike that more than a bar of bitter chocolate,” he replied, laughing along.

As they spoke, she slowly nibbled away at her candy, until there were only four squares left.

“Hey,” she said, with the same quiet voice she had called out to him with. “It looks like I’m gonna be going soon…” she stared down at her hands. “So… I just wanted to say, thanks for talking to me. I think it made it go a lot faster.”

“Oh,” he began, a terrible guilt descending upon his heart. “I didn’t mean to-”

“No,” she cut him off. “I’d prefer it more than if I had to eat it alone…” her face cast a dreamy look at nowhere in particular. “I think I’d like this even more than if it had been milk chocolate.”

He didn’t know why, but he felt like throwing up.

She took a bite.

“Hey…” he thought, something strange occurring to him.

Another bite, one more square left. She looked at him sweetly, holding the last of the candy between her slender fingers.

“Does she have any pupils?”

*Bite*

Adrian felt a wave of queasiness come over him; his eyes closed as he lost consciousness. He couldn’t see her last moments, but that sweet expression, her messy hair, the shimmer reflected in her eyes…

He didn’t know her name, but he didn’t need to. She would be a fragment of a halcyon night.

---

Adrian awoke to the early morning light cascading over his face. He slowly sat up, straightening his back against the park bench, yawning.

“Did I spend all night here?” he wondered. Any other time before this, he would have been alarmed at the idea of sleeping in a city park, but today he was unbothered by it. As he looked around, a handful of people were walking about him. He was almost set off by their presence, but something in his hand caught his attention, something he hadn’t noticed before.

“A- a chocolate bar wrapper? Why is this in my hand? This was that-”

He cut himself off before he could finish the thought. It was better that way.

He stood to his feet and began on the pathway leading back to his home. He passed many different people, but he found that he was not so hostile towards their presence.

As he left the park, stepping foot onto the sidewalk, a thought drifted into his mind.

“There was truly nothing in that park that wasn’t me.”

The world he stepped into was nothing but light.