Dreamy. Everything is beautiful now.
The auroras do most of the work. They lace the sky with impossible color, slow-moving ribbons of light that make the city’s colors feel curated, like someone finally understood what it was supposed to look like. The glow spills down the sides of skyscrapers, melts into the glass and steel and turns every window into a fragment of a stained-glass cathedral. The whole place looks soft and technicolor.
It feels like the auroras were the missing piece. Without them, the city was fine. With them, it’s unreal. A dream you don’t question while you’re inside it. Back home, I barely noticed the change. It was just another side-effect, 50-ish days into December. Just background. But here? It’s like the world is holding its breath to make sure you’re looking in the right direction.
I wasn’t. I hadn’t moved for thirty minutes. I was still wrapped in a towel, standing barefoot on cold tile, staring out my bathroom window like it was a museum exhibit. Even this angle, even this stupid, ordinary slice of city I had seen from this exact perspective a thousand times before, was breathtaking now. Steam fogged the glass and cleared again, over and over, like the window was breathing with me.
And the cube.
The cube was also there, I guess.
At the very edge of the city, where streets stop, a massive black cube sat perfectly still against the horizon. No markings. No seams. Just… a cube. When the auroras caught it at the right angle, light slid across its surface and vanished, swallowed whole. It always looked ominous, but tonight it looked deliberate. Like it belonged in the frame. We never talked about the cube.
I replied, still standing perfectly still.
I pressed my forehead lightly against the glass. The city hummed below. Windows glowed. Traffic crawled through its veins. Above it all, the auroras slid overhead, slow and deliberate. At one intersection, every traffic light had turned magenta at once. Not ideal for traffic, but manageable. Everyone seemed to agree that if a light wasn’t green, yellow, or red, then it was safer to treat it as red.
I did not.
After that he left me on read because he knew I was just trying to get on his nerves. As I detached myself forcefully from the window, I glanced, one last time, toward the edge of town. The cube was barely visible from here. Just a dark interruption in the glow of the city.
I missed you, too.