CITY OF STRANGERS

~JULIAN’S POV~

They released me at 10:30 p.m.

Not midnight earlier a moment that felt strange and intentional, like the universe wanted to spit me out at the most inconvenient time possible. A guard once told me the night releases were reserved for the “non-newsworthy,” the men nobody wanted to photograph, the ones headlines had long since been buried under more recent scandals.

Two years ago, my name still made noise. Now they released me like bad breath quietly, quickly, with no audience to watch.

The guard shoved a plastic property bag into my hands. It crinkled loudly in the fluorescent hallway. Inside was everything I had left of the life I’d destroyed:

A dead phone with my leather jacket that used to fit me. A gray shirt that faded so much I wasn’t sure we could call it grey anymore. Black jeans that had never seen prison laundry chemicals. A wallet with thirty-two dollars but most importantly my precious watch I dreamt of wearing again for the last months. With me were all the letters Ava had sent. I kept every single one, folded carefully and tucked inside the property bag like they were worth more than anything I’d owned before all this. They weren’t dramatic or romantic or anything like that, just her words, the only voice that reached me on the inside. I read them over and over during the long nights when the noise from the other cells wouldn’t let me sleep. They reminded me that someone out there still remembered I existed. No one else wrote. Claire didn’t. The people I used to call friends didn’t. I wasn’t surprised, not really. But the silence from everyone else made her letters mean even more. They were the only pieces of the outside world that didn’t feel poisoned. The only thing I had left that felt real. 

I forced myself to look at my reflection in the glass panel beside the exit something I hadn’t done in months. Maybe a year. I’d avoided the mirrors in the prison bathrooms. Something about them felt way too cruel. The man looking back at me was not the one they locked away. My beard had grown thick, uneven, dark with streaks of premature white. The skin beneath it looked sharper, thinner, my skull was peeking through. My hair was longer than I’d remembered. It grew in uneven layers from prison scissors, some locks curling with neglect. My eyes were the worst part. They were hollow in the middle like a candle that had burned itself down.

I looked older maybe ten years older, grief and punishment had done an amazing job on me.

“Vale?” the guard said behind me, uncertain.

“Yeah.”

He hesitated like he wanted to question it. Maybe he didn’t want to hand freedom to a man who looked like he’d been scraped off the bottom of the system. But then he nodded and pushed open the final steel door.

The night slapped me across the face.

The city was loud in a way a cage never is cars rushing through puddles, subway grates breathing steam, sirens crying somewhere far and then suddenly close, as if unable to decide which direction tragedy wanted to go. The smell of gasoline, rain-soaked cardboard and cigarette smoke was an assault on senses that had adapted to sweat and rot.

Manhattan at night was a drug I forgot the taste of. It was exhilarating.

I stood there on the sidewalk, property bag tugged against my chest, the wind slicing through my thin shirt. The leather jacket was too cold to put on; it felt like wearing nostalgia.

My breath fogged the air in front of me.

A woman in a short red coat walked past. She glanced up, saw the beard, the rough hair, the sunken eyes and looked away fast. Two years ago I couldn’t go three feet without being recognized, without hearing my name whispered or shouted or recorded. Cameras followed me, fans clustered around me, critics dissected me.

Now the city didn’t even flinch I passed unnoticed like smoke. Maybe that was what death felt like: walking through the world and watching it exist without you.

I forced my legs to move toward the taxi line. They felt stiff, like hinges that hadn’t been oiled. The pavement beneath my boots was wet and slick, reflecting the city lights like broken mirrors.

A cab slowed, its yellow paint shining dully under the street lamps. The driver rolled down his window, eyes tired, accent thick.

“You need a ride?”

I nodded and opened the door.

“Where to?” he asked.

Where to?

Blackwater Hall was gone seized, emptied, sold like a fallen empire. My penthouse had been stripped before the investigation even ended. Some studio exec probably lived there now, or someone newly rich with no idea they were sleeping where I once existed. No hotels would take me my name still registered in certain systems, flagged like an infection.

I had no friends left to call I doubted even Claire would answer my call. 

No family they were all gone.

No bandmates who gave a damn.

No producer willing to gamble their career by offering a couch.

I was houseless in the city I once owned.

I felt my throat tighten.

“I um”

“You got cash?” the driver asked, eyes flicking to me in the mirror.

I pulled out the wallet.

Thirty-two crumpled dollars.

Two twenties once would’ve been a drink tip. The driver clicked his tongue with disappointment, not cruelty.

“Ah… brother, that’s not gonna get you far here.”

I swallowed.

“It’s all I have.”

“Did you just get out?” he asked 

I didn’t answer.

He sighed.

“Look, I’m not trying to be an ass. But I got kids. I can’t give free rides tonight.”

He jerked his head toward the door.

“Sorry, man. You gotta get out.”

The humiliation burned hotter than any winter could. I stepped into the cold again, the warmth of the cab evaporating instantly from my skin. The driver pulled away, his brake lights staining the wet pavement behind him red like blood.

Snow began to fall slowly in lazy flakes then it began to fall harder, flakes drifting from the dark like they’d been waiting for me. I didn’t move. I just stood there as the cold settled onto my cheeks, my lashes, the rough edges of the beard. Each flake melted on contact, leaving behind a warmth that shouldn’t have been possible. And something inside me broke. I had spent two years burning trapped in a cell, trapped in my own guilt, trapped in memories I deserved to relive until they carved me into someone unrecognizable. I thought the fire would finish me. Maybe it needed to. Maybe that was the only way to strip a man down to whatever truth still lived under the ash.

When the snow touched me, it felt like the first breath after drowning.

It wasn’t just cold it was cleansing. Purifying in a way I didn’t believe I deserved. And as it settled across my face, soft as a hand I’d once loved, I couldn’t stop the thought that rose uninvited:

Maybe this is forgiveness mercy of being allowed to start again.

Ava’s face flickered through my mind then clearer than any memory I’d let myself cling to in that cell. Her voice. Her steadiness. Her fury. Her grief. Maybe God had put her in my path because I needed to be broken open. I needed someone to drag every lie out of me, to burn me down until there was nothing left but the truth.

She had been the fire. The punishment I earned. The mirror I couldn’t escape. And yet she was also the one who kept me human in the darkest hours. Her memory had been the thin thread that kept me from unraveling completely. If God had sent her to judge me… He had also sent her to save whatever piece of me was still worth saving. As the snow kept falling cool, patient, impossibly gentle. I felt something shift inside my chest. Something I hadn’t felt since I was a boy.

Hope.

I lifted my face toward the sky, letting the snowfall wash over me like a blessing I had no right to claim. And in that moment, I understood something that made my throat tighten and my eyes burn behind the cold:

I had walked through fire. I had been stripped down to bone. And this, this quiet, freezing night was the moment I could be born again.

I could feel my shirt soaked through almost instantly. I looked up at the sky gray and heavy, I wanted to scream, but my throat locked around the sound.

Men in prison scream.

Men outside learn not to.

I walked without knowing where I was going. My fingers went numb in minutes.MI passed the pawn shop by accident. The neon sign buzzed loudly, bright red letters flickering:

BUY — SELL — CASH NOW.

An  invitation.

The only one I had.

I pushed the door open. A bell chimed overhead a sound so cheerful it felt mocking. The inside smelled like metal and dust, and something faintly chemical, like old batteries. Glass cases displayed rings, watches and old guitars.

The man behind the counter looked up.

His eyes assessed me instantly; beard, thinness, plastic bag, the haunted look only men with criminal records wear.

“You selling?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“What you got?”

I slid off the leather jacket, the one Ava once knew. I was probably wearing it during our interviews the nights that truly mattered in my life. He inspected it for what felt like ages.

“This is old but It’s still good quality.” He shrugged. “I’ll give you thirty.”

“But I bought it-”

He cut me off with a flick of his fingers.

“Maybe it was luxury once. Time changes that”

I nodded, because what else do ruined men do? He counted out three crumpled tens.

I took them they felt heavier than money should.

When I stepped back outside, the cold smacked my bones directly. My shirt was too thin, the wind unforgiving. Without the jacket, I felt like a raw nerve exposed to the city’s teeth. But now I had sixty-two dollars enough for a cab, maybe enough for a cheap room for one night in a place nobody looked at your ID too closely.

I lifted a hand as another taxi rolled by. The driver eyed me, then stopped.

“Where to?” he asked.

Anywhere where I will not freeze to death sounded like the honest answer.

I closed my eyes a flash of Ava’s face appeared behind my eyelids. Her eyes, dark and stern, cutting through me. The way she wrote my confession with a hand that trembled to the very end.

“Away from here,” I finally said.

The driver nodded.

“Seatbelt.”

As the cab pulled away from the curb, I watched the detention center shrink in the rear window. It looked smaller from the outside than it ever did from inside. Just a block of concrete and metal, nothing special, but it held every terrible moment of the last two years. Every mistake I’d made, every hour I couldn’t sleep, every thing I wished I could take back. Seeing it get farther away felt strange, almost uncomfortable, like leaving behind a version of myself I wasn’t sure what to do with expect to burry deep enough. Part of me was relieved to see it disappear another part of me felt sick thinking about how much of my life had been eaten up in there.

“You look like hell,” the driver muttered conversationally.

I huffed something close to a laugh.

“Yeah I know I was there.”

He glanced at me.

“You got out today?”

“Yeah.”

“Tough night for it.”

“Tough life for it” I corrected.

He snorted.

We drifted into traffic lights smearing into streaks across the glass, colors bleeding together like watercolors running in the rain. The city felt too big, too loud, too alive. It felt like a place I didn’t belong anymore. And yet, every corner, every breath, every flicker of neon seemed to whisper the same name back at me:

Ava.

She lived in the quiet of my thoughts during lockdown. She lived in the walls, in the long nights, in the moments I almost broke. She haunted me like a prayer and a curse.

“Where exactly you going?” the driver asked gently.

I stared out the window. The city lights reflected against my face.

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

He nodded.

“Alright,” he said. “We’ll figure something out.” 

And for a fleeting moment I let myself believe him. Because on the first night of my freedom, I realized something beautiful: In this endless city, Ava was breathing the same winter air as me. But then I wondered if she would even recognize me? Would she pity me? Would she hate me? Or, worse, would she feel nothing at all?

Here was the truth: freedom didn’t quiet the haunting it sharpened it. Now that I was out, I had nothing to hide behind. No walls. No routine. No noise. Just the weight and the memory of her. Being free meant I could try to find her if I wanted to… but being ruined meant she might never want me anywhere near her again.