Moths

Andrea leans over the rail of the 'Cheap Apartments for Foreigners' complex. A tiny ember lights the cigarette between her fingers. Her thoughts flare up as well—suddenly clear. All it takes is a breeze to ignite them.

Taro has followed her out onto the balcony, he's trying to hug her from behind. This guy doesn't get a damn thing. She elbows him. He steps back, lingers at the door, then shuffles into the one-room apartment, where he'll start thinking on what he did wrong.

Andrea doesn't enjoy treating him like a dog in training. Yet, her boundaries are already stretched thin. She tolerates his sweaty post-orgasm hugs and a long list of minor grievances. Other boundaries are sacred.

She wants to be alone before the night. The November chill means nothing to her skin. Andrea brings the cigarette to her lips. Someone older, next time, she tells herself. Not that age matters. Men get delusional easily, anyway.

To his credit, Taro eats pussy like his life depends on it. Maybe he even enjoys it. Nothing perfunctory in how he does it. Andrea inhales the tar. Beyond the row of apartments, the skyscrapers' lights wink at her. Next bouquet of flowers, she's dumping him.

It would be doing him a favor.

A few fucks with an 'exotic' foreign woman aren't an escape. Taro's face spells out his destiny: small-time bourgeois in the making, in line with his predictable, unoffensive name. He’ll end up boxed in at some accounting firm, a battery hen of paychecks, pulled from the clutches of some despotic boss. By twenty-eight, his parents will pressure him into marrying a round-faced woman and taking out a mortgage for an apartment in some sleepy outskirt. By thirty-five, his abs will give way to his gut. Before fifty, he'll screw up big time with a younger woman, if he's lucky, a mistake he might be forgiven for.

The smoke disappears into the night sky. Andrea wishes she could see her future as clearly. She can only hope her days won't be filled with social media feeds of cute animals, not to become a Sunday opinionator or a slipper-wearing homebody. But most of all, she prays she'll never get excited over a recipe video from some lacquer-nailed YouTube brat or, worse, a lady on a cooking talent show.

The wind takes her cigarette away, ash nearing the soft skin of her fingers. She tosses it over the railing before the embers can burn the soft inside of her skin.

It'll end like this. Maybe she's cold and emotionally unavailable. Jaded. Maybe she just has keen eyes. Despite all the romance, a guy like Taro would never marry an older foreigner. They deserve each other. They're the same.

A moth flutters just above the railing, twirling towards the naked light bulb of the balcony, frying its legs.

It's so easy, to screw yourself for a little bit of warmth.