The night was still. The gentle breeze that had caressed his face only moments earlier had ceased abruptly, as if someone had closed an open window. Above him, the stars twinkled in the distance, casting a gentle glow on the earth below. He stood silently on the balcony, alone, hands clutching the black railing before him, almost afraid to let go.

He took a deep breath, inhaling the sweet scent of the cool night air before expelling it from his body, wishing that the heavy feeling in his heart would disappear along with it. He turned his head, glancing back into the room where the woman slept on, ignorant to his absence from the lavish hotel bed.

She had been the same as all of the others, earning herself a nameless, faceless place in his memory; for after tonight, that’s all she was. That’s all they ever were. Memories. Reminders of the fast lifestyle he’d chosen.

In the morning, if he was lucky, she would throw her rumpled clothes on, slip her high heels onto her feet and attempt to fix her hair as much as possible before slinking out of the room without waking him. She would scurry back to all of her little friends and tell them the tale of how she’d slept with a super star.

Most likely, she would leave out many of the original details, instead filling in the story with her own version of events here and there. She would not, for instance, tell them how he’d called her the wrong name three times during the evening. Nor was she likely to disclose the fact that he’d been impersonal and rude, using her for his own pleasure and caring precious little for the fact that she’d not gotten any sort of satisfaction.

But frankly, he cared very little for what story she’d tell her little friends. He’d never see her again after tonight, and even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t remember her.

He left the balcony, returning to the hotel room before heading straight for his bag, which had been thrown across the room in his haste to get to the venue that afternoon. He knelt down, frowning slightly when the woman on the bed (was her name Erica? Or maybe it was Molly) shifted. For a moment, he thought that she may be waking, though he was pleased when she didn’t.

He reached into his bag and pulled out the bottle of pills that had been buried beneath his clothes. After popping the cap off of the pills, he removed two and threw them into his mouth before tossing his head back to swallow.

He headed into the bathroom and turned on the faucet, allowing the cool water to run into his palm before rinsing off his face. He took a moment, staring at his reflection in the mirror, briefly wondering what had happened to him. He had once been so full of life, but now, he went through all the motions of his day on auto-pilot.

A shower would have to wait until the morning, he decided. The pills he’d swallowed had already begun to work their magic, and he knew that in ten minute’s time, he would be in dreamland. He exited the bathroom, turning off the light as he headed back into the bedroom.

The thought of crawling into the bed with Erica (or was it Molly?) didn’t seem at all appealing to him, so he simply made a bed on the couch, using the spare pillow and blanket in the bottom drawer of the dresser.

It had not been an easy feat, getting comfortable on the couch, but he knew comfort would not matter to him once the pills had done their job. From his place on the couch, he had a clear view of the world outside, and try as might to sleep, he couldn’t help his gaze from returning to the stars above, becoming quite entranced by them. When he was merely a child, no older than ten, he’d often wondered what it would be like, walking high above the earth, looking down at all the people below him.

It had been a lesson he felt he’d be better off without. For it was, he now knew, lonely among the stars.