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He once hired a prostitute off of a street corner. It was an ominous night that saw him lead her into that second-rate hotel room, but the air hung with more significance than it did with foreboding. The first thing he did was throw open the musky and dust-covered curtains so that he could see the moon that hung with unnatural radiance through the smog in the night sky. And it was only when she asked him what he wanted when he began to talk.

He lived in a world that looked on him with biased eyes. He took rainbows and sunsets from the sky and used the world as his canvas; he created artworks like they were children, believing that they could not be more beautiful and loving them as he would love himself. But the world would much rather hear the symphonies that he could pluck from the heartstrings of the broken masses, those dark requiems that he ever so wished that he could compose with color rather than sound. It told him that it would reward him if he decided to pull his soul into those symphonies, something he wished so much that he could still do. It therefore looked on him with scorn and disdain, and the brokenhearted masses that were once so pleased to hear the expression he gave them now look upon it with disappointment.

He lived in a world that made him. Just as the whole universe would be pointless with no life to observe it, his existence would mean nothing as well if nobody observed his heart. They looked on it with a loving gaze, but even with the whole world cheering for the way he felt, he still felt so very lonely. It wasn't sympathy or empathy that they saw him with; they didn't know his person, and something was missing from what would be paradise because of it. But it was a cruel and ironic existence that he carried out with this, because the world had given him what he wanted when he asked to be heard, and when he asked the world to hear him without apathy.

He lived in a world that made a science of death. He had seen every aspect of it systematically go through a person's mind, simply discarding whatever they didn't like, treating it almost as if it wasn't a part of who that person was. He knew who he was now and he remembered what he used to be, and that may have been the most terrifying thing to him. Because with these memories and this knowledge he knew that he had changed, and he didn't have a clue whether it was of his own accord.

This change was killing him; he could not put himself into his work with the same vibrancy as he had before. The once-adoring masses now turned from him in disinterest; something that he had seen happen to so many others before him. It was a system, a cycle of commercializing a person's soul until there was nothing left in that shell of a person. And every time, society simply moved on to the next talent, the next beautiful heart; licking their bones clean as well. It was such a waste. They were all so nice.

And now it had come for him.

His name was Houston Blue. On that night he sat on the edge of the bed, fervently staring at the undying moon out the grimy window as he poured himself out to the hooker on the bed. Her eyes shifted from an empty look of boredom to one of abject amazement as she began to feel the pain that he lived with. When she had let him lead her into that filthy room for rent, she had expected anything except this. But there was simply no one else left for him to turn to.

He thought himself a bad person. But as he walked out of the room with the weight of bottled-up emotions finally off of his chest, he left that girl with something. She shared his pain now, and she sympathized with him just as much as any person could. But even greater than that was what she learned. He had been one in a million, in a million people just like him. He was one in a trend of people selling their soul, not to the devil, but to the world around them. Every one of them sold their soul out of need and misconception, and she would feel sorry for them if she had not done the same with her body. She thought that there must be a city's worth of people out there that have made the same choices, that experience the same fame, and that hold that pain in their heart. And she knew that, so long as there were artists, there would be people like her, who would share the pain of Houston Blue.