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The Eighteenth-Floor Evening centers on a sudden loss of power—an event that strips away modern conveniences and forces the narrator to sit with the natural world. Technology here represents constant motion, noise, and distraction. When it disappears, what remains is elemental: ocean waves, wind, distant voices.

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Eighteenth-Floor Evening

By Harry Arabian

The sun had just slipped below the edge of the world, leaving a violet afterglow stretched across the horizon like a slow exhale. From the eighteenth-floor balcony of my high-rise condo, the ocean was a vast sheet of moving glass—miles of shoreline, tide breaking in rhythmic breaths. I leaned back in my chair, legs stretched out, letting the breeze carry the salt and quiet into the room behind me.

Spotify played softly at my side. My Top Songs 2025. A private little soundtrack to the night: songs I’d played during morning walks, during long drives, during days when life felt heavier than usual. Now they drifted into the warm air, each familiar note stitching itself to the scene in front of me. It felt like the world had slowed down just for this moment.

Then everything snapped to black.

The building across the way—dark. The strip of hotels down the shoreline—dark. The pool deck below—completely swallowed. Even my own apartment behind me gave a soft click, then silence.

“What the…?” I muttered as the music cut out mid-chorus.

I clicked my phone’s screen. No service. I toggled to my news feed—still nothing. If this was some big event, the world hadn’t caught up yet. I closed out Spotify, then powered down the phone entirely, suddenly aware of the thin line between convenience and dependence.

For a moment, there was only darkness.

Then new lights emerged—tiny, scattered, flickering across the water. The distant boats. Their cool bluish beacons shivered across the black surface, as if someone had flung a handful of stars too low and they’d gotten tangled in the waves.

And beneath that… sound.
The waves were louder now without the hum of civilization. Crashing, retreating, repeating. A pulse from the ocean’s oldest memory.

Soft voices rose from the balcony above mine.

“Total blackout,” someone said. “Main power’s off. They said it’ll be restored in one hour.”

An hour.
It felt both like an inconvenience and a gift.

I leaned forward, elbows on the balcony rail. With the power gone, the city felt strangely honest—its edges softer, its heartbeat slower. The warm air brushed against my arms, and in the distance, the boats shifted gently, like lanterns drifting on a giant sleeping lake.

For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t scrolling, wasn’t catching up, wasn’t chasing anything. I was just there—on the eighteenth floor, suspended above the world, listening to the dark and the water whisper to each other.

When the lights finally blinked back on an hour later, I didn’t rush to power up my phone.
I stayed exactly where I was, letting the old world return gradually, as if easing out of a dream.