I bring you this: a bouquet of shadows beneath my ink. They are not flowers, but the lingering shapes of things that departed before they were ever truly gone.

Les longs adieux. The slow, agonizing drain of the tide, not the crash of the wave. You told me the city was just a collection of bones, but I know it is a city of ghosts, a sprawling, sun-drenched, desolate, and beautiful nightmare of eucalyptus and broken glass.

I am dipping my pen into the martini glass, writing with the residue of a forgotten, frantic night—the kind of night that leaves a bitter, black ash on the soul.

I stand on the redwood steps, looking at a city that has no place for a man who still believes in the obsolete, and I am sending these shadows to you.

They are the scent of stale cigarette smoke, the whisper of a name that can no longer be spoken without bringing down the rain. Goodbye, my dear.

It is a word that should be spoken once, but we have made it a career. We have turned our lives into a long, quiet, and absolutely heartbreaking goodbye. There is no honor left in the world, only the performance of it—and here is my performance, wrapped in ink and shadow, handed to you on the threshold of a dark room.

You were the first to go. I am left to deal with the ashes. The longest, coldest goodbye of them all.