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me: you're eating another baguette? that's like, six.

anne: um, excuse me. we're here to get well-rounded.

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I glanced up when I was walking out of the metro. The night was so dark but I could see all these white shapes moving in it, and for a second I didn't know what they were. The playlist I was listening to ticked off and it got so quiet, and then I realized that all the white shapes were people's breaths, in the cold. There were all these people moving and breathing and speaking to each other, out in the distance. Their coats were dark and I couldn't really make out their words. All I could see of them were these ghosts, twisting and evaporating in the dark.

I asked him whether he had a good time, and he told me it was at this place next to Moulin Rouge. Oh good, I said, then you had fun? He replied that there were almost a thousand people there. I asked him whether he met anyone that he liked, and he told me that drinks were five Euros and six of his friends ended up having to carry him home. It was just that good of a night.

Sometimes I think about this kid who died when we were in the eighth grade. He drank a lot of cough syrup mixed with other things that were mysterious to me and a lot of kids skipped school two days later so their moms could drive them to the funeral. I think it's weird that all of us, all his classmates, are in college or married or working now, and his fourteen-year-old body is slowly falling apart underground, and the rest of him is- where? What is he doing, what can he see, what is he thinking? I want to ask him all kinds of things, but mostly whether he regrets it now.

Sometimes when you're listening to someone who's really boring or filling out paperwork in a language that you don't understand, it occurs to you that something somewhere went really, really wrong, and none of us have really belonged here since.