I stood below the towering resorts that shimmered with thousands of lights, all in different colors. The space around me, in its distinctive colors, highlighted the wildly unconventional features that set it apart from the others. Looking up distracted me from what sat in plain eyesight, which is almost indescribable, filled with myriads of bodies bustling past, while others barely stumble. This place seemed to strip the personalities away from people, taking societally functional individuals and recycling them into animalistic pawns in an isolated, reality-devoid game.

On the direct left from the corner on which I stood, stretched a line of people across from an older woman, scantily clad in a rhinestone-encrusted ensemble with plumes of ostrich feathers sprouting from her headdress. Her beaming smile and flirty facade was magnetic to the majority who walked passed, drawing them to her line. Barely 21-year-old college students, newly retired baby boomers, and of course, middle-aged men, drunk on beer, who acted like they were the first to flirt with her all day. She persisted, however, distracting each patron from her visible smile lines, exhaustion, and annoyance.

With such poise, she snapped photos with each person in her line, receiving small handfuls of cash after each interaction. I assume it must be worth it only from the dollar bills sprouting from the small clutch she kept at her side. There were at least 70 in there, though with her charisma, probably closer to 120. She was what the consumer wanted — she effortlessly embodied the playful cheekiness of Las Vegas, a beacon to everyone who walked past this corner. A decked-out distraction from reality rolled into a single woman.

A few feet behind the glittering showgirl in a stark, dirty corner sat a man, no older than 25 — however, he could be mistaken for decades older if not for the shred of youth in his fatigued, sunken eyes. Almost motionless, he lied on the floor in his tattered shirt and jeans, head resting on an old backpack. It was as if only his body remained, while he was long gone, not present or conscious, despite the chaos all around him. He did not make eye contact with any person, nor did any of the world around him cause an emotional or physical reaction of any sort.

People passed by him hurriedly, grabbing onto their children, spouses, and such as if he cared. It was more likely that he didn’t notice them at all. There was but a shred of life left in him, enough to keep the blood pumping through his veins, but not much else. He served as a portrayal of depressing reality against the showgirl’s glamorous performance that represented the commerciality of the city. A young, washed-up representation of the cruel world.

It smelled strongly of weed where I stood. It wasn’t as though someone around me was smoking it — instead, it seemed to be a buildup from years of people smoking it in this area. But then again, this was not the only corner in Vegas that smelled like this. The dust from the desert lying beneath, and the perfumey scents wafting from the hotel lobbies created a conflicting ambiance around me. It was an unsettling marriage of the advertised fantasy and the grim reality of this specific corner. The only thing holding it together being the consumer, the ones that saw this place from an ignorant lens, and those who were simply too intoxicated to acknowledge the dismal underbelly of Vegas. These were people who paid to be stripped of their reality for a speck of time, and to be distracted entirely.

The corner on which I stood was but a morsel of Vegas, exciting and charismatic, and yet ever so depressing and dark not far beneath the surface. People pass by aimlessly, manipulable pawns to the profit-generating, morally void anti-reality that they knowingly fed. A superficial microcosm of grim humanity.