Note: This isn't written about anyone in particular. It was a short that came to me a couple days after a very long road trip to Lost Angeles where part of my goal was achieved, but I was left with a hole inside me the likes of which I'd never felt. I guess it goes to show inspiration really can crop up out of nowhere.

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Hollywood Nocturne

The sky darkened to the booming of distant thunder.
Abreast a storm layered sky rose the shadowed hillside of a young mountain range as it made a slow creep toward the valley bellow. Rain from its predecessor pounded the pavement in small icy darts, pattering windows and pinging on tin roofs and car tops in a orchestra of ghostly rhythm. The streets were void of life. Darkness and gloom were its walkers--its midnight travelers. Windows were shut, doors were locked, streetlights continued to glow and cast an eerie river of rain spotted light onto the street. There was hardly any traffic in this desolate forest of steel and cement, save for the rare lost motorist using the headlight beems to cut a path through the night hopefully back to their safe home.
A lone figure hunched beneath a thick brown trench coat laden with water. A mere shadow, oblivious to the unforgiving rain or rolling of thunder blanketing the sky from east to west. The night seemed to be for him--the lone boulevard traveler. His pace was dispondant, his hands that clenched in the pockets of his faded Levi's were rough and scratched, and his head hung low shaded only by wet strands of hair that hung limp over a once young and eager face. He watched silver droplets splatter on the aged cement of the sidewalk by his black sneakers with empty eyes, disturbing the resting place of a can tossed at some point during the day by an uncaring tourist.
Litter, rain, and thunder were his only companions as he made his way through the gloom that fell around him in an orb of enclosing defeat, sucking at him, tearing at the bit of spark--the bit of soul left harbored in his body. The frail lamplight did nothing to pierce the gloom. It shattered at first touch, recoiled, and seemed to hide altogether to avoid being tainted by the pain of the lone wanderer.
This city, so alive in daylight with its skyscrapers, its hotels and busy streets, its famous walk, had been the womb of his hopes and dreams. He thought he would be free here, as many before him had perceived. The City of Dreams, they'd called it. The city of everlasting light and holiday had beckoned to him from his safe home far away to walk her without care. At one time she had fulfilled her promise, let him taste the pleasing riches of fulfilled desires, let me revel in the love of the puplic eye, roll in mounds of parchment, and proudly proclaim himself the king of this world. It was perfect, yet she was always concealing the beast that stalked the routes and boulevards one step behind him. It nipped at his heals. For years she had been his friend, his home, his mother. He did not know of her vicious plans of betrayal. Like a fly trap, she had her prey.
Too fast she struck, stealing the day and leaving the gray skies to smother those dreams and crush those hopes, releasing the beast to feed on their sweet flavor. He was foolish to think the beast could not harm him, that the night stalkers of the city would forever vanish from his presence. No, the pain was too real to deny anymore. Like the rain, it bore upon him to soak through the coat and his faded black shirt, ragged from a once glorious day, and burned his skin--an ever reminder of the reality of the beast. Now he no longer dwelled in the day, but in the cold shadow of despair where dreams flickered, faded, and died.
The abandoned son turned a corner, leaving the apathetic light of the boulevard street lamps behind for the abyssal grim that awaited to darken him.